Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [123]
And when he tried to share the little things, like contemplations on urinal flow, it always seemed to backfire.
“Are you ready to go?” Emma asked, moving past him to dump her tray full of trash into the bin.
“Sure,” Milo said, suddenly fearful about what else he might say to her, concerned that the next revelation might be stranger than the last.
By the time they had doubled back onto Interstate 95, the need to bowl a strike had lit up in his head like noontime sun and his fear of not being able to satisfy it was blossoming. Milo also sensed that this was just the first in what would soon become a six-car pileup of demands that he would not be able to control.
chapter 29
Bowling was a bad place to begin.
With the discovery of the twenty-four-hour bowling lane in Vernon, Milo had rarely needed to put off fulfilling this demand, so for reasons that he did not fully understand, it was more difficult for him to quiet the need now. Had a word like conflagration or placebo lit up in his head, he would have been better equipped at stemming its tide, particularly if a solution was found and only required time to enact. But the need to bowl a strike was so often immediately satisfied that it demanded the same now.
Also, it would be difficult to explain to Emma why he suddenly wanted to go bowling, since he had explained how he needed to be back in Connecticut by midafternoon the following day. Half an hour after leaving McDonald’s, Emma had broached the subject of their evening plans, suggesting that they stop and sleep whenever Milo felt the need to rest. He had been relieved, fearing that she might want to drive straight through the night in shifts. Luckily she, like Milo, did not think that driving overnight was the safest idea, even with two of them shouldering the load. Though the decision over sharing a room had not yet been raised, Milo guessed that Emma would want her own room, which was fine by him. The privacy might permit him the opportunity to go out bowling, provided that he could find a lane that was open.
“Where do you think you might want to stop?” Emma asked. “It’s your choice. Okay?”
Milo told her that he’d drive until he was tired and then stop at the next hotel, though he had a specific place in mind.
The jelly jars in the trunk began calling to him (he suspected that two jars would not be nearly enough this time) about fifteen minutes after the demand for bowling had made its appearance, and this was followed closely by something new: the desperate need to let the air out of his tires. He could only guess that the demand arose after driving by a motorist experiencing car trouble, but no specific incident came to mind. The demand was also connected with the sudden realization that the majority of the air in the Honda’s tires was more than five years old, and though it made no sense to him, this seemed entirely too old to be driving long distances.
As Milo had feared, these three demands began echoing in his brain, feeding off one another, making his attempts to hold them off ineffectual. The added stress of the mounting demands only served to heighten their intensity and potentially bring on others, and Milo knew that if he didn’t find a way to satisfy them soon, his ability to think clearly and even drive effectively might be compromised.
It appeared that the U-boat captain was flooding all tubes, ready for an all-out assault.
There were mechanisms that Milo had developed in order to keep his demands at bay, but even these were impossible while trapped in the confines of the Honda. Small pressure releases were often enough to stay the demands temporarily, things such as the snapping and unsnapping the buttons on his jacket or jeans, the popping of a sheet or two of bubble wrap, or the inflating and deflating of a balloon (he kept a supply of them in the glove compartment). But without the proper jacket, a supply of bubble wrap, or a means of explaining his balloon procedure to Emma, Milo’s only option was to begin snapping and unsnapping the snap that closed his jeans around