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The road cut through everything, all the houses and farms and trees, and in a moment they were on a bridge going across a river that went off forever on both sides of the bus.
"Quick," the Mommy said."Draw the river."
As if he'd just discovered this river, as if he'd just discovered the whole world, she said to draw a new map, a map of the world just for himself. His own personal world.
"I don't want you to just accept the world as it's given," she said.
She said, "I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that."
The boy had the pen now, and she said to draw the river in the book. Draw the river, and draw the mountains up ahead. And name them, she said. Not with words he already knew, but to make up new words that didn't already mean a bunch of other stuff.
To create his own symbols.
The little boy thought with the pen in his mouth and the book open in his lap, and after a little, he drew it all.
And what's stupid is, the little boy forgot all this. It wasn't until years later that the police detectives found this map. That he remembered he did this. That he could do this. He had this power.
Still reading, the detectives ask, "What's all this stuff that looks like maps? All these pages of drawings?"
It's funny, but i'd forgoten all that. Those are maps. Maps I did when I was a little boy, a stupid, gullible little shit. You see, my mom told me that I could reinvent the whole world. That I had that kind of power. That i didn't have to accept the world the way it stood, all property-lined and micromanaged. I could make it anything I wanted.
That's how crazy she was.
And I believed her.
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