by Andrew Smith
The clothes I’d taken off were cleaned and returned to me, and Major Knott also gave me socks and new underwear, which I had to get used to, but he let me keep the hospital scrubs so I had something to sleep in. And every morning, I brewed American coffee for Major Knott and the other people who worked in the administrative office.
I couldn’t help but think about the boy named Ocean, whose clothes I wore and who also at one time made coffee for people in a different life and a different world.
Every evening before he’d leave me alone to watch television until it put me to sleep, Major Knott and I played chess. I beat him only one time, and he complimented me, even though I can’t be certain if he was just playing weak to let me win. We talked about science, the world, and about the company Major Knott managed in America, called Merrie-Seymour Research Group, in particular, a part of its labs called Alex Division.
“Do you ever wonder how much of a footprint we leave, Ariel?” Major Knott asked me one time while we played chess.
I looked down at the floor. I thought maybe someone had carried in mud.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“There’s not a single thing on this planet—not an organism, a sea, a river or lake, and even the weather that surrounds us, that hasn’t been changed by human beings. For good or bad, we’re in charge of the rate at which everything changes now. Every living thing, and the majority of nonliving systems, too,” Major Knott explained.
“We’ve become our own God, I suppose.”
Major Knott said, “In some ways. But in other ways, we’ve trapped ourselves, and if we’re not careful, the whole thing could fall apart.”
“What happens if we are careful?” I asked.
“If we’re careful—and smart—we can control everything to our benefit. We decide on weather patterns, forestation versus desertification, we can shape evolution, decide on extinction, make the world exactly the way we want it to be. All for the best, of course. That’s part of what we do at Alex Division,” Major Knott said.
“Sounds like an important job.”
“Even more than you might imagine, I would guess,” he told me.
“I can’t imagine anything that I haven’t got the words for,” I said, “but I do like science.”
“And languages, too,” Major Knott added.
I smiled and nodded.
Max, I never wanted to leave the building. In fact, I had not gone outside for nearly a week. I was too afraid of being stranded out there, of having to go back to the orphans’ tent. When I did finally go outside into the city of tents, it was with Major Knott. He took me to the hospital to be examined by a doctor.
It was very uncomfortable for me. The doctor looked at and touched every part of my body, and took X-rays, too. Then Major Knott walked with me to where the soldiers got haircuts. The barber cut off nearly all my hair and he shaved the light fuzz off my face with a straight razor. Of course, that was completely unnecessary, but the barber and Major Knott had a laugh over my getting a shave, and told me that all boys always remember the first time they shave.
Major Knott said this was the first step for me on my journey to a new family and a new home.
My next life.
Major Knott kept telling me to be patient, that he’d found the best thing to do with me. Still, I desperately wanted to know what he thought was the best thing to do with Ariel. But I trusted him completely. Why wouldn’t I? Major Knott had given me more than anyone ever had in my entire life.
The snow had melted, and the alleyways through the city of tents were transformed into swampy canals of mud. As we walked from the barber’s, I felt like a new person—a different one. I could smell the menthol of the shaving cream on my face, and I daydreamed that Major Knott would take me to live with his family.
“Are you married?” I asked him.
“Yes,” Major Knott said. “My wife is American. We have a home in West Virginia. Do you know where that is?”
I nodded. “In the eastern United States, between Virginia and Ohio. Do you have any children?”
Major Knott chuckled. “No. No children, Ariel. Why?”
“Oh. I was just wondering,” I said.
- - -
The following day Major Knott took me to see a dentist named Dr. Mather. He spoke with an American accent. I had never been to a dentist in my life. It frightened me when Dr. Mather put his hands and metal instruments in my mouth. He could tell I was very nervous; I was shaking.
I will tell you, Max—I almost started to cry. I couldn’t see the point in putting things inside my mouth.
Dr. Mather said, “I’m going to have to extract a couple of your teeth, Ariel.”
I started to get up from the chair, not because I was going to run, but because I felt like I was going to vomit.
Dr. Mather put his hand on my chest and said, “It’s okay. You won’t feel it at all. I’m going to give you a shot. Really, it’s nothing.”
The dentist called Major Knott into the examination room and both men looked at X-ray images of the inside of my mouth, while Dr. Mather pointed from image to image with a surgical-gloved hand.
Dr. Mather spoke to Major Knott as though he were my father, which I suppose Major Knott had become after the day on the hill.
He said, “The boy is afraid. Do you want to stay in here? Maybe say something to him?”
So Major Knott stood beside the armrest of my chair. He put his hand on mine and I instantly felt better, safe.
Major Knott said, “It’s not a terrible thing, Ariel. I’ll stay right here the whole time. Would that be all right? Or if you feel very troubled, we can go home and come back some other time. What do you think?”
When Major Knott offered me the opportunity of ending this, and when he talked about going home, which was my little room with the television and coffeemaker, everything seemed to get vastly better.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What will it be like to have some of my teeth taken out?”
Major Knott smiled. “There’s nothing to it. I’ll be here the whole time.”
“Okay, then. Thank you.”
To be honest, I don’t even remember anything at all after Dr. Mather put the gas mask over my mouth and nose. The next thing I knew, I was lying on my couch-bed in my scrubs, covered in blankets while the television played a science-fiction program from England. And there was cotton gauze that tasted like medicine in my mouth.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME
My fifteenth birthday came four days after our visit to the dentist. I didn’t say anything to Major Knott about it, so he must have found out from the information that was written down during my physical.
To tell you the truth, I tried not to think about it at all. A birthday has a way of making you condense everything that’s happened in a previous year into something like a small pill, and then it forces you to swallow it. It had been one year since I playacted the part of Pierrot for my classmates and later hid inside a refrigerator after the slaughter at the schoolhouse.
On my fourteenth birthday, exactly one year earlier, I believed it was a miracle that I was alive.
On my fifteenth, I wasn’t so sure that it was anything other than an accident, Max.
But on that morning Major Knott and the entire staff of the UN administrative building came into the break room while I was sleeping. Major Knott carried a cake with fifteen candles on it, and everyone sang to me.
I had never seen a cake like that, Max. Also, the singing terrified me. Think of what it was like for me—I was asleep, wrapped in heavy blankets, and then suddenly I was assaulted by all these noisy grown-ups carrying something that was in flames.
It took me a while to figure out that what was happening wasn’t a nightmare. And when I did, I felt so sad for all the things I had left behind in my first lives. That’s a funny thing to admit to, i
sn’t it? But you can’t expect to be pulled from one life and emerge into another and carry along anything with you besides all those stories that never go away.
Major Knott could tell I was overwhelmed. After they finished singing to me, he put the cake down on the table where we played chess every night.
Major Knott rubbed his hand in my hair and said, “Happy birthday, Ariel.”
I looked at him, then at the fiery cake.
“Thank you.”
“You’re supposed to blow out the candles and make a wish,” Major Knott said.
It was very confusing, Max. And I couldn’t think of anything to wish for, either. What else could I possibly want?
There was so much to think about, and yet everything I considered was something I did not want. It would only make me feel worse to contrive a wish that could never come true—to go back home, to make things revert back to the way they used to be, to never have come to the city of tents in the first place. But I got up from my couch-bed, stood over the burning cake, and blew the life out of all those little candles. Then people clapped, and we all had cake and coffee for breakfast.
It was nice.
And after everyone left and we were alone, Major Knott told me he was going to take me to America to live with a new family, they were going to adopt me, and that I would have a brother who was my age. Well, sixteen days older, but you already know that.
Happy birthday to me, right?
Major Knott seemed surprised that I didn’t look happy. He asked me, “What do you think about this, Ariel?”
I didn’t know what I was supposed to think about this. There was an awful lot for me to think about. I didn’t want to leave. I know at the time it was a foolish sentiment, but I wanted to stay there and live in that small break room forever, until it was safe to come out—just like the refrigerator. But I had an overriding sense that it would really never be safe to come out, right? And I didn’t want to go away from Major Knott, either. I was so tired of being saved and saved again and again. Couldn’t I just stay in one place—frozen there forever?
It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.
I sat down on the couch and looked across at the remains of the cake.
“Is something wrong, Ariel?”
I shook my head. It was all I could do, but the effort fell far short of convincing Major Knott that things were perfectly fine.
I didn’t want to answer him because I felt so sad about everything. I thought about all the terrible stories I’d been carrying with me, and it was suddenly too much. I didn’t believe I could carry anything else with me—at least, I did not want to try. I knew I would start crying if I said anything, and that would be unfair to Major Knott. He had done so much for me. He was too nice and didn’t deserve my making him feel bad. But who am I to say what people do or do not deserve?
I shook my head again and looked down at my feet, the gray socks they’d given me, sliding this way and that way on the cool slick floor of the break room.
Major Knott pulled a chair around from the table and sat down right in front of me.
“I understand this is going to be a drastic change in your life, Ariel, but you just don’t see how fantastic everything is going to be for you from now on.”
There’s a word for you: fantastic.
Think about what it really means: unreal, imagined. Why would anyone think fantastic was a good omen of my future?
I realized I was pouting. My chin was down and I wouldn’t look Major Knott in the eye.
He put his hand on my knee and said, “You’ll like the Burgesses. Jake Burgess works with me, in West Virginia. I’ll take you to his house and you’ll see. His wife is named Natalie, and their son—your new brother—is named Max. He’s a funny kid, Ariel. You’ll have a good life there. It’s a beautiful place, and I live quite close to them—your new family.”
“You do?”
Major Knott nodded and smiled.
“We’ll see each other often. I promise, Ariel. And the Burgesses have a very clever pet—a crow, named Alex.”
So what do you think, Max? Maybe they should have changed my name to Alex, too—all things considered.
SOMETHING MORE LIKE FONDUE
The same year that Jake Burgess was perfecting the genetic diversity and de-extinction of Polynesian crows, while his wife was pregnant with Max and a hominid monster discovered in a block of Siberian ice in 1880, a woman I never got to meet was pregnant with me on the opposite, less civilized, side of the world.
Most things, including the Siberian Ice Man, aren’t ever really discovered; we just were never looking at them in the first place. But, like the Siberian Ice Man who developed alongside my brother Max inside Natalie Burgess’s womb, these things we humans credit ourselves with discovering were actually always in plain sight to begin with, it’s just nobody ever took the time to look at them.
And that same year when Max and I were born, my American father, Jake Burgess, also stumbled upon a process for manufacturing a new variety of carbon-polymer composite whose molecules were arranged in such a way that when it was shaped in precisely determined dimensions, the material could absorb all visible light. It could become, at certain angles, absolutely invisible to the human eye.
The Merrie-Seymour Research Group and Alex Division used the carbon-polymer composite to construct small mechanical drones.
Their drones were everywhere, watching and listening.
One of the drones had been following a man named Leonard Fountain, who had been one of Alex Division’s first—and highly flawed—human biodrones, for a very long time.
- - -
“Why are three polar bears with a Soviet flag hitchhiking on the side of a road in Virginia?” the melting man said.
“Probably climate change,” Crystal Lutz offered.
“Do something right for once in your life. Shoot them. Shoot all three of them!” Joseph Stalin told him.
“You’re slowing down. You’re slowing down,” 3-60 said.
“I am slowing down,” Leonard Fountain agreed, “and it is hot, too. Maybe Crystal has something.”
The melting man shifted in his seat. He felt the gun in his back pocket. He wanted to do something right for once in his life.
“Pull over and shoot them!” Joseph Stalin ordered.
The melting man eased the gun from his pocket.
The three polar bears carrying the Soviet flag stood beside the road and watched as Leonard Fountain’s U-Haul van slowed to a stop in front of them.
“Do polar bears speak English?” Leonard Fountain wondered aloud.
“You are waving to the polar bears. You are rolling down your window and gesturing for the three polar bears to come to you,” 3-60 said.
- - -
Actually, the three polar bears were not polar bears, but boys from Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. And their flag was not a Soviet flag, but a triangular red vinyl pennant with the word JUPITER written on it.
In the melting man’s hand was a small chrome-plated .380 semiautomatic. And inside the melting man’s head was a brain that had become something less of a brain and something more like fondue.
OUT FOR A WALK WHILE OUR PORRIDGE COOLS
The U-Haul van slowed to a stop in the middle of Route 600, directly in front of where we stood.
“Do you think he’d be willing to give us a ride back to camp?” Cobie Petersen asked.
“There’s nothing in the rules that says we can’t hitch a ride,” Max said.
“I thought in America, people always tell kids to never get in cars with strangers,” I said.
“Loosen up, Ariel,” Max argued, “besides, it’s a moving van, not a car. Nothing bad ever happens to kids in moving vans.”
When the van stopped, the shadowy figure behind the wheel rolled down the driver side window and stuck
his arm out, waving for us to come around to him.
I carried our flag. Cobie Petersen and Max followed me out into the road and we walked around the front of the moving van so we could see what the driver wanted.
I think the three of us simultaneously recoiled as though we’d all been slapped when we got a clear view of the man behind the steering wheel. And the truck itself gave off the hot smell of rotting meat and maggots.
“Holy Jesus,” Max whispered.
“Something’s wrong with that guy,” I said.
I have seen some things more repulsive than the man at the wheel of the van, but they were all either nonhuman or dead. The melting man was outside of both of those group classifications. He wore a plaid hat with a narrow brim that turned down in the front, and his head was bandaged around with stained medical tape that attached small plastic windup timers to his ears. The lack of eyebrows and eyelashes made him look almost fishlike, and his skin burbled with oozing pink blisters. A small worm-trail of blood slithered a sluggish path from his right nostril toward his upper lip.
Cobie Petersen, mouth slightly open, looked at Max, then me, then he spit down onto the asphalt between his feet and grimaced.
- - -
“Hello, friendly bears!” The melting man said, “Do you need a lift? Where are you heading?”
“Shoot them, Leonard! Do something right!”
“Oh. Uh. No thanks, but thanks anyway,” the tall bear said, backing away slightly. “We’re just out for a walk while our porridge cools.”
“Dude, I’ll play three bears with you, as long as I’m not the mom,” the small bear—the one without the flag—said.
If the melting man had eyebrows, they would have gotten closer together. He had a sudden thought. He pointed at flag-bear’s chest. The melting man happened to be missing the fingernail on his pointer.
“You are pointing at the bear. You are pointing at the bear with the green camp T-shirt on.”
“Hey!” The melting man said, “That’s exactly where I’m heading!”
Each of the bears was wearing a Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys log-fonted T-shirt, with adhesive Jupiter name tags.