by Andrew Smith
I felt myself reddening, thinking about how everyone had been watching me and Major Knott.
“He asked Dad if you ever had another episode after the one on the airplane.” Max shook my foot again and said, “What’s an episode?”
The niceness of the morning, of being there in my own bedroom and talking to my brother, suddenly turned to ice.
Of course I knew what it all meant, even if I didn’t say anything to Max about it. They had been using me; I was another surveillance drone, maybe something worse, not quite a person, I suppose; not quite a crow.
- - -
I took Max’s bicycle and rode over to Major Knott’s house that morning before Jake and Natalie got out of bed. Or maybe they weren’t even home; who could say?
Max wanted to come with me, but I talked him out of it because there was only one bicycle, and I told him I needed to talk to Major Knott alone. I didn’t know how to get to Major Knott’s house, though, so Max had to give me directions, which I wrote in black pen on the back of my left hand.
Also, I wasn’t very good at riding Max’s bike. I crashed turning the corner on Stoney Creek Road, which was the street Major Knott’s house was on. I scraped my elbow pretty bad on the pavement and dripped a little trail of blood droplets up the road.
Max told me Major Knott’s house was the second or third house on the right. He didn’t know the house number, but he told me it was a one-story brick house with a white door, which pretty much described every house I saw on Stoney Creek Road.
Naturally, the first door I knocked on was not connected to Major Knott’s house.
The woman who answered the door was a dark-skinned Asian lady, who was about four inches shorter than me. She was wearing a lacy pink nightgown that was nearly transparent and reached the tops of her feet. Her hair was rolled up in curlers of all different sizes and colors, and she had a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.
I was afraid of her. I knew right away I must have guessed the wrong house, and thought she would be mad at me, so I just stood there with my mouth open, dumbly staring at the lady.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“You’re bleeding. What happened?”
“Oh. Uh. I crashed on my bike. Well, my brother’s bike.”
The woman sucked on her cigarette and turned her chin so she wouldn’t exhale the smoke on me. She blew it out her nose inside her house.
“Come in. I have something you can put on it.”
She swung the door wide.
“Oh. No, I wasn’t looking for help. I was looking for a friend of mine. He lives on this street somewhere. His name is Harrison Knott.”
“The English guy?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a friend of yours?”
“Yes.”
“Well, come in. I still have something you can put on your arm. Unless you want to bleed on his porch, too.”
I looked down and noticed the little splotches of blood I’d deposited beside my foot on the painted concrete porch.
“I’m sorry.” I could feel myself turning red.
The woman sucked on the cigarette again.
“Don’t be.”
The smoking woman took me into her kitchen, where she ran warm water over the scrapes on my arm. She washed off my wounds with her bare hands, all the while sucking on her cigarette and carefully blowing the smoke away from me. She turned the water off and said, “Stay there.”
What could I do?
I stayed there with my arm in her sink.
She grabbed a clean dish towel from a drawer and then patted my arm dry.
“Does that hurt?”
“No. Well, yes. A little.”
Then she wrapped the towel around my arm and led me over to her small dining room table.
“Sit down,” she said.
I sat down.
She disappeared into a hallway behind me. It was all so strange. I couldn’t understand why the woman would so matter-of-factly take a kid into her house—a bleeding kid—and then try to help him without even hesitating or thinking about it.
When she came back, she had some antiseptic spray and two flesh-colored bandages, about the size of index cards. I thought about writing Inside a refrigerator on one of them before she stuck it on my arm.
“You’re not from here, are you?” she said.
“From here?”
“Yeah. Here. West Virginia. America.”
“Oh. How can you tell?”
She exhaled smoke. “You have an accent. It’s cute.”
“You’re not from here, either,” I guessed.
“How can you tell?”
“The hair curlers?” I asked.
The woman laughed and smoothed the bandages over my scrapes.
“You shouldn’t leave these on, but you don’t want to bleed on the English guy’s house. Take them off today so you can get air on that road rash.”
“Is that what it’s called?”
“That’s what kids here call it,” she said. “What do kids call it where you come from?”
“An accident.”
She took the cigarette out of her mouth and dropped it in an ashtray that looked like an orange abalone shell.
“The English guy lives in the next house that way.”
She pointed at her kitchen wall. There was a painting of two dolls hanging on it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“If he’s your friend, how come you don’t know where he lives?”
I showed her the writing on the back of my left hand.
“It’s my brother’s fault.” I said, “He gave me bad directions.”
- - -
Major Knott was having coffee on his porch and reading the Sunday newspaper when I rode up Stoney Creek Road and deposited Max’s bicycle on the corner of his front lawn near the driveway.
If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t show it. And if I was happy to see him—which I wasn’t—it didn’t show, either.
“Ariel! Good morning!”
I stood in the grass at the bottom of the steps leading up to the porch, not really sure of where to begin.
So I said, “What did you do to me?”
Major Knott’s smile dissolved. He folded the newspaper and placed it on the table.
“Do you want to sit down?”
He pushed a chair out from the side of his small table.
I looked over my shoulder to where Max’s bike lay in the yard. Major Knott’s wife was in the garden, bent over a row of tomato bushes. She was young and pretty, just like I’d pictured the type of woman who’d be attracted to Major Knott. I almost had the feeling someone was watching us.
Someone was always watching us, I suppose.
I climbed the steps and sat down beside Major Knott, and said it again: “What did you do to me?”
Major Knott’s tone was unapologetic. He turned his hands up and said, “I brought you to America.”
- - -
Inside his office, Major Knott said this to me: “Suppose you were flying in an airplane. Just you, the pilot, and someone you love, someone you care about very much. Do you have someone like that, Ariel?”
I thought about Max, but I didn’t want to say anything to Major Knott about people I cared for. It was all a trick, an accident of my survival, anyway.
He continued: “And suddenly the pilot jumps out of the plane, so the two of you are left up there, alone in a plane with no pilot. What are you going to do? Crash, or learn to fly?”
I didn’t answer him. Why should I? Did he think I was stupid, even after I’d figured out what he’d done to me?
“Someone has to fly the plane, Ariel. Someone has to keep us from crashing, because it’s certainly going to happen if we
don’t. That’s why we—your father and I, and the rest of us—do what we do. We have to figure out the controls.”
So that was it: controls. Extinction, de-extinction, drones and biodrones, a chipped boy rescued from a tent full of orphans, even girl sperm.
And he actually thought this was flying the plane.
I said, “Show me how it works. You know, what you did to me, the thing you put in my head when you took me to the dentist.”
“Sit down here.”
Major Knott wheeled his desk chair out for me, and I sat facing a computer monitor. He took out the little controller he’d used on the plane to make my headache stop and handed the device to me. When I looked at it closely, I saw my name—ARIEL JUDE BURGESS—printed along one side.
The thing actually looked like a touch-screen cell phone. He told me to press the home button and the panel lit up with an array of colored and numbered buttons.
“Touch that green one and watch the monitor,” he said.
What I saw looked like I was standing in a hall of mirrors: the computer screen inside a computer screen, inside another and another, infinitely. I was looking out my own eyes at an image of looking out my own eyes. Forever.
“The home button turns it off,” he said.
I turned Ariel Jude Burgess off.
I sat there for a moment, just thinking about all the things I wanted to say, and not knowing where to begin. I was shaking; I felt myself starting to cry.
“How could you do something like that to me?”
I honestly didn’t think he would answer me.
Then Major Knott said, “I’m sorry, Ariel. But I took you out of that place, too.”
“You fucking destroyed me, is what you did. You can’t just use people like that.”
And then I thought, what a stupid thing to say. Apparently Major Knott, my father, the Merrie-Seymour Research Group could use people—or birds, cats, frozen devil-monkeys, and flying invisible boxes—any number of ways they wanted to.
Major Knott looked hurt. He put his hand on my shoulder but I pushed him away.
“Look, Ariel—”
“No. You look. What am I to you? A cat? A crow? Some fucking experiment so you can take the controls? I’m a human being. You can’t just—How could you do this to people?”
A tear dripped from my chin.
Major Knott lowered his voice. “I’m sorry. I do care about you, Ariel. I do. You have to know that.”
What could anyone ever know?
“Did you do it to Max? To Cobie Petersen?”
Major Knott swallowed and shook his head. “No. You were the first person for Alex Division. Well, the first one in ten years. I promise. I’m very sorry, Ariel. We weren’t going to use you anymore. I promise. What can I say? I’m so sorry. You weren’t supposed to know. Nobody should have known.”
MAX AND HIS BROTHER
I hadn’t seen Major Knott since the Sunday morning when I rode Max’s bicycle over to Stoney Creek Road. I went back there one time to bring some flowers to Mrs. Le, the cigarette-smoking woman who’d bandaged my arm after I crashed. I suppose I still couldn’t figure out why some people will go out of their way to help a complete stranger and, on the other hand, why others will treat someone they care about as though they’re disposable objects.
And I know Major Knott cared about me, which made the whole thing even more puzzling.
Before I left his house that day, Major Knott gave me the little controller that turned Ariel Jude Burgess on and off. He promised—for whatever that was worth—that there was no other way for Alex Division to use me, to look through my eyes and hear what I was hearing, and he told me I could do what I wanted to with the device. When I rode away, I almost felt as though Major Knott expected me to go steal something and bring it back for him, as Isaak did, even if it was something completely worthless, like a bag of clothespins, just to affirm Major Knott was at the controls and the plane was flying just fine.
I kept Major Knott’s device for a few days, and then I threw it into Dumpling Run without telling anyone my last, little, terrible story. Why should I give something like that to Cobie Petersen or Max? There was no way to fully trust or believe Major Knott, anyway, and like Cobie said, maybe all three of us really had been chipped.
Who would ever know?
After coming home from Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Max and I spent most of our free time over at Cobie Petersen’s house. And whereas Major Knott had given me credit for figuring out how I’d been used by Alex Division to keep an eye on my own father and also to watch what Mrs. Nussbaum, who mysteriously vanished that summer, was doing with the boys at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, I figured something else out, too—and it was something nobody at Alex Division had caught on to.
It was this: Cobie Petersen’s two younger sisters, Kelly and Erica, were the girls Mrs. Nussbaum referred to in her book about male extinction—the ones who’d been created with girl sperm. That was another story that would never leave Ariel’s library.
Erica, who was almost fifteen, liked me very much—I could tell. And I liked her, too, which gave Max sufficient reasons to tease us both incessantly.
- - -
In September, before the fall session of our tenth-grade year started at William E. Shuck High School, Cobie Petersen took me and my American brother Max out coon hunting with him and his dog, Ezra.
I don’t think Max or I wanted to actually see Cobie Petersen kill a raccoon; we just liked spending time with him.
Cobie was the only one in our hunting party who carried a rifle. Shortly after midnight, as we trudged through the dense woods along the bank of upper Dumpling Run, Cobie Petersen stopped us by raising his hand and saying, “Gents, I do believe coon hunting’s a bust tonight.”
“The three bears are going to go home empty-handed,” Max said.
“It’s a great night to be a coon,” I said.
“And a sad night to be a talking bear,” Cobie added.
And as though to punctuate our misjudgment with an exclamation point, Ezra immediately started howling and barking, running wildly through the brush after what sounded like a monstrous raccoon.
“Oh, shit,” Cobie said. “Let’s get this one.”
And the three bears took off in the direction of Ezra’s baying.
- - -
Here is the Dumpling Man, who in another life was called Katkov’s Devil, the Siberian Ice Man, another immigrant in Sunday, another one of the things Jake Burgess and Alex Division brought back from the dead—like me.
The pale thing with horns and hands sat hunched down on a branch six feet over our heads in the West Virginia woods.
Cobie Petersen aimed his rifle at the snorting creature as Max shined a blinding flashlight beam at the thing in the tree.
“See? I told you he’s real,” Cobie whispered.
Ezra barked and barked.
The thing looked exactly as I pictured it from Mrs. Nussbaum’s book and from Cobie Petersen’s scary story. But after hearing all the legendary rumors about the Dumpling Man, I never would have imagined him to be less than four feet tall, which is a rather generous estimation of the little horned man’s height.
Still, he was kind of scary looking. I suppose if I had been more infused with biblical images, I may have thought, as others had, that here was the devil himself, but I found myself feeling sorry for the small, naked, and sparsely white-haired creature.
Who could say how long he’d been trapped in ice, only to end up here in Sunday without any say in the matter at all?
“Don’t shoot him,” I whispered.
“I’m not going to shoot him,” Cobie Petersen told me. “If I was going to shoot him, he’d already be dead.”
Then Cobie snapped his fingers at Ezra, who instantly stopped barking and sat down.
“Then what are we goin
g to do with him?” Max said.
The Dumpling Man cocked his head at the sound of Max’s voice, then he leaned forward from his perch, straining with his big amber eyes to see us three boys below him.
“Nothing,” Cobie said. “Leave him alone.”
“It would be cool if people could see him,” Max whispered.
“Why?” I asked.
Max shrugged. “Yeah. Probably not.”
Then the Dumpling Man said, “I don’t just let anyone find me, you know?”
And my brother Max raised his hand above his head, straining to lift himself as high as his tiptoes could get him, and held his fingers out just below the little man.
The Dumpling Man smiled a toothy grin that seemed to split his head in two. He reached down and touched Max’s hand.
And Max turned off the flashlight that had been shining on Katkov’s beast, and said, “Let’s just leave him alone.”
So much for extinction.
epilogue:
MASON-DIXON-BRAND SAUERKRAUT
Here is a fishing lure, wedged between two flattened rocks at a depth of three feet in a slow bend of a creek called Dumpling Run.
The lure is what boys here call a plug, carved from basswood with an inset glass-bead eye, painted red at the diagonal slash of the mouth with hexagonal dots of yellow to mimic the scales on a minnow trailing back along its tapered length.
A double hook dangles from the front, a triple from the tail.
When the three boys uncover it, they are hunting crayfish for bait. The epoxied wooden lure has been wedged between those unmoving flat rocks in Dumpling Run for more than half a century.
Here is Natalie Burgess, standing alone in aisle seven of the Sunday Walk-In Grocery Store. The sauerkraut she prefers, Mason-Dixon brand, has been moved to a lower shelf.
- - -
Outside the market, cars speed by along South Fork Route. Natalie’s Volvo is parked across the street.
- - -
Here is a handful of dirt—just dirt from a field where I played with my friends on my fourteenth birthday. And here, too, are all the things in the terrible stories we pile and pile in our library that is always at capacity, and also is never full—ice, dogs, cats, coffee, clowns, and crows.