Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories Read Online Free

because of the last guy, and now the new guy thought he could line up work on a salmon fishing boat, which was why they were driving to a place on the Washington coast that his mother kept calling the end of the earth . At least one good thing about this place, Arnie figured, would be that if his mother took it into her head to move any farther west they’d have to set sail for China. And his mother usually didn’t go in for Chinese guys.
    The new guy had been an abrupt transaction. This morning, which was now yesterday morning, Arnie was woken by the crinkling sound of his mother putting his clothes into plastic grocery bags. “You can bring one toy,” she said, and he chose a flying lizard that transformed into an attack spaceship. But when she put the bags in the hatchback of their old Datsun, she saw he’d also thrown his fishing pole in.
    “I said one toy,” she’d objected. “We still have to fit Jay’s tools and the TV.” But he’d argued that a fishing pole was not the same thing as a toy, and the new guy intervened on his behalf, assuring her that the fishing pole might come in handy.
    “Lotta fish in that ocean,” he said. “Lotta salmon in those creeks.” Arnie knew the new guy’s name was Jay, but the old guy’s name had been Ray and Arnie was afraid of mixing them up. Like the lizard and the attack ship, they were mostly interchangeable: same body — long-armed, short, and barrel-chested — but with different heads. Over the years, the guys stayed the same age while his mother got older. In this way they were the one constant she maintained.
    The new guy had a beard and he drove, their Datsun blowing blue smoke out the back. From the back seat, Arnie saw the Sierras swirling away in a haze of blue mist. The new guy called Arnie “Little Man.”
    “Yo, Little Man back there, fish me up another pack of cigs.”
    It was morning when they left, and it was the next morning but earlier still when the Datsun sputtered up the coastal range and finally glided down its westward edge, exiting the firs that closed over the road just as the first light silvered the edges of the bay. Giant brown creatures, standing chest-high in the marsh grass, stared at them as they drove by.
    “Elk,” said the new guy. “Ain’t that something.” Arnie’s mother was sleeping, slumped against where the window handle would have been if it hadn’t broken off. There were dozens of elk, chewing thoughtfully, whisking their tails to reveal their white rumps.
    “Hey, whose idea was this?” the new guy said, reaching back between the seats to muss up Arnie’s hair.
    When the road finally ran out underneath them, they checked into a motel, where Arnie’s mother stumbled into bed without ever fully waking. The new guy snored like a car ignition trying to catch, holding out the possibility of something about to happen. Which might not ever happen. For a long while Arnie lay on his own bed and tried to sleep, but couldn’t. There was too much bed and it made him feel exposed, as if he were camped out on the desert.
    Actually, he’d liked living in the desert, how clean it made him feel. Instead of a lawn they had a whole yard full of white rocks. But in Las Vegas he had missed water, real water and not the fake-o reservoirs stocked with stupid placid perch. He missed the idea of himself living by a creek and him being the boy who sits on the bank of it, fishing. It was something he’d done only a few times, back when they’d lived in Denver, and he’d never caught anything but still he’d liked it. The quietness, sure, but also the promise that fishing made about another world existing right under your nose. A world with animals who could extract the secret air inside of water, using combs they carried in the sides of their own necks. This was how the new guy, Jay, had sold Arnie on the trip, even though it meant leaving the white rocks and all his other stuff behind. Jay had promised him that when they got to the