Mosquitoland

Mim starts walking to different gas stations in the area asking for Ahab. No one seems to know who he is. She gets discouraged and falls asleep under an overpass while holding her mom’s lipstick. 

Mim wakes up to see a boy her age standing in front of her. He says his name is Walt, and he’s playing with a Rubik’s cube and drinking a Mountain Dew. Walt reminds her of her close childhood friend Ricky, who had Down syndrome. Walt says that his mom is “with the white pillows. In the casket” (122), and his dad is in Chicago. It’s clear that Walt is all alone.

She tries to hitch a ride with a woman in a car, but she gets out when she realizes that she must have dropped her mom’s lipstick. She goes back to the overpass, where she does not see her lipstick but notices a rabbit-like shape formed by the cracks in the pavement. She finds Walt still there. He loves shiny things, and she realizes that he probably has the lipstick. She follows him as he runs into the woods, feeling like Alice in Wonderland following the white rabbit.  

Mim follows Walt into the woods. They stop at a clearing, and it’s evident that Walt lives here. He calls it New Chicago. She feels sad that Walt seems to be a forgotten kid, and she embraces his friendship. They take a swim together in a murky pond, and she ponders how “detours are not without purpose. They provide safe passage to a destination, avoiding pitfalls in the process” (131). This moment with Walt is a much-needed detour; she slowly starts feeling better.

Mim gives Walt war paint with mud instead of lipstick. Another boy named Caleb appears from the shadows, tall and wearing a red hooded sweatshirt like the one Mim is wearing. Walt seems to know him, and it’s clear that Caleb has been camping here with Walt. Mim is creeped out by Caleb, who is “tall. Freakishly so” (136). Caleb eats some of Walt’s canned ham and immediately starts talking about his abusive father. One day, Caleb got tired of his dad’s abuse, so he: “Pulled the fire extinguisher out of his garage and beat the shit out of him” (137).

Mim writes to Isabel to tell her about how creepy Caleb is. Caleb reminds her of a “terrible feeling she had once” (139). She used to sneak out of the house on her birthdays to see movies with her friends. The first couple times she did this, she would sneak back into the house and get in trouble with her parents. On her 13th birthday, after sneaking out to see The Shining, she came back to a quiet house. Her parents didn’t care enough to wait up for her and discipline her. She tells Isabel, “I hope you don’t know what that feels like” (142). 

Mim wakes up with a horrible stomachache. She relieves herself in the dug-out “shit-pit,” and then she hears Caleb in the woods arguing with someone. From the arguing it becomes clear that Caleb and this person are hoping to steal Walt’s money that he got from his dad, and they’re talking about killing Mim if she gets in the way.

She realizes that Caleb is arguing with himself in a different voice, and she thinks of her dad whispering a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Caleb realizes someone is there, and Mim runs through the woods and jumps into her sleeping bag. She closes her eyes, and Caleb appears. She pretends to be asleep while he stands hovering above her.

She somehow falls asleep and awakes thankful to be alive. Caleb, who Mim has decided is a “shadow. A creepy-ass-Gollum-Gollum-schizo-effing-shadow” (150), goes off to bathe in the woods. Mim alerts Walt to pack his things so that they can run away. 

Walt returns Mim’s war-paint lipstick. They run through the woods to get away from Caleb, but he chases after them. Mim think they’s headed for the highway, but Walt leads them to a gas station. He retrieves a hidden key, clearly placed there by the gas station owners specifically for him, to unlock the door. They lock the door once inside, and Caleb appears like some “zombie-eyed maniac pounding his fists against the door, gasping for breath, raging bull-mad” (155).

Mim follows Walt to the rooftop of the gas station. A “fat guy” whom Mim calls the Pale Whale, but whose actual name is Al, is sitting on a lawn chair drinking daiquiris. Walt asks where Albert’s boyfriend is, and he says that he’s in karate class. Caleb is suddenly on the rooftop, too, and he’s wielding a hunting knife. Albert tells Caleb to leave and calls him a freak, but he supposes that it’s not Caleb’s fault because “that’s a brand of bat-shit crazy you can’t control” (160). Caleb goes to attack Albert, but suddenly Ahab appears and knocks Caleb to the ground.

Thrilled to finally find Ahab, Mim briefly explains how she sort-of knew his aunt Arlene. She gives him Arlene’s wooden box that she’s kept in her backpack and walks away. He asks if she wants to know what’s inside, but she doesn’t because she believes that this moment belongs solely to him.

Mim writes Isabel to tell her about the rooftop incident. She also reflects on why she liked Dr. Makundi so much: “He played games and told stories” rather than prescribing her pills (171). She thinks about Caleb and wonders if maybe the reason he turned out the way he did was because he didn’t have a supportive family to help “the storm pass” (174).

An officer joins Mim in an interrogation room to ask her more questions about the Caleb situation and where she’s headed. She lies, and when he leaves the room, she and Walt run away.

Mim tries to buy a truck from an older man. He refuses since she doesn’t have a driver’s license. Beck Van Buren (the handsome man from 17C on the Greyhound) then appears in the yard and claims that Mim is his sister. He shows the man his driver’s license, and they buy the truck.

They get food, and Mim gives him a brief overview of where she’s headed and why. He says that he’ll drive her. She’s attracted to Beck, and she wants “so badly for him to be real, to be good, to be a person of major fucking substance and despair” (190). Beck says that he’s a junior in college but that he’s taking a break to explore his photography passion.

Beck has a black eye, and he says he got it from a fight back at Jane’s Diner. He says that a man wearing a poncho (Poncho Man) sexually assaulted a young girl in the bathroom, and when Beck realized it, he punched him in the face, in front of a cop. Poncho Man was arrested. Mim feels guilty for not having turned in Poncho Man after he tried to assault her. 

Mim writes to Isabel to explain the moment when her parents told her they were getting a divorce. That night she had a dream that she and her mom morphed into the same person in front of her mom’s vanity. They drew pictures on their face in red lipstick. In the dream, they said, “The war paint is our only color” (201).