One hand on the lid, he reaches in with the other, his fingers covered in wool. He touches the tip of the nose first and imagines something other than a face, something that looks back up at him.
Something with fingers that can touch.
He moves quick, running his hand over the rest of the face.
Satisfied, or something like it, he pulls his arm out and lets the lid slam closed.
Then he hears what can only be commotion in the hall. Nobody hurrying this time. He heard voices. More than one. Possibly even somebody yelling.
Eyes closed, still anxious, Dean lowers himself from the first coffin and makes his way back to the door. He’s moving too fast, and he knocks another box to the ground, but this time doesn’t bend to retrieve it.
In the hall, the door closed behind him, he opens his eyes.
And sees a familiar face walking toward him.
“Gary,” he says. “Hi.”
Gary’s silver hair and gray stubble glisten under the car light, and he looks momentarily insane.
Then Gary smiles and wipes his hands on his sweater.
“Needed some air,” he says.
Dean, still shaken, nods. He likes Gary. Gary has ridden the train before. Numerous times. He always gets off at Indian River.
“Close to your stop,” Dean says. It’s supposed to be funny, as the train doesn’t actually stop for Indian River, but Gary will get off all the same.
“Yes,” Gary says, stopping a few feet away. “Can’t wait.”
“And Nathan?” Dean asks.
Gary thumbs toward the train’s back door.
“He just got off. Gonna walk the rest of the way himself. Knows of a man who makes his own ice cream around here. He has a sweet tooth.”
Dean nods again. He can’t tell if it’s because Malorie has piqued his mind with her talk of boxed creatures or it’s because he literally just searched two dead bodies in storage, but he doesn’t feel right about this encounter. It feels like Gary is hiding something.
“Wanna walk with me back to my room?” Gary says.
Dean doesn’t want to, but doesn’t know exactly why.
“Thanks, but I got some work to do,” Dean says. He thinks of Malorie, no doubt waiting for word on what was in the coffins.
Gary smiles. “If I don’t see you again, thank you,” he says. “It’s a pleasure as always.”
“Be careful getting off,” Dean says. It worries him. And maybe that’s it. It worries him that Gary and his friend Nathan get off the train whenever they feel like it. At this speed, it’s not unsafe, but Dean worries.
“Always am,” Gary says.
He passes Dean, and Dean watches him go, vanishing into the next car.
“She’s really gotten into your head,” he says.
He brings a hand to his head, to run his fingers through his hair, but feels wool against his skin instead. Wool that just touched dead bodies.
He shakes the hat off his hand and thinks how crazy it is that for a second there he felt like he’d been touched after all, like he’d somehow ended up in the presence of real, actual madness.
TWENTY-TWO
When Gary reaches the spot between cars where Tom sits, cross-legged, eyes hidden behind strange glasses, looking as content as any teenager ever has, he pauses.
“Tom,” he says, loud over the wind. “Are you enjoying the ride?”
Tom looks surprised for having been caught. No doubt shocked that Gary is looking at him, here, between cars, without a fold.
“Yes, what are you…how are you…”
Gary smiles.
“Helluva thing. A train.”
Tom gets up.
“Henry,” he says, “how are you—”
But Gary interrupts him.
“Hey, I’d love to show you something. Come to my room?”
To Gary it looks like Tom hears his mother’s voice in the deep, dark distance. She’s telling him to put on his gloves. His sweatshirt. His blindfold. She’s telling him not to go into the room of a stranger.
But in a way, Gary has watched this boy grow up. Numerous trips to Camp Yadin fortified his belief that Malorie would never move again. Once he stayed three winter weeks in the shed that housed the boating equipment. Once he even entered Cabin Three as they slept.
He was there when Tom asked the census man to leave the papers on the porch. And he knows what Tom’s going to say now before he says it.
“Sure, Henry,” Tom says. “I’d love to.”
TWENTY-THREE
Tom isn’t used to the motion of the train yet, and he can’t imagine he ever will be. This is his first time in the big world and, here, now, his first time sitting with a stranger without Malorie perched on his shoulder.
Screw Malorie.
Henry looks like a big child to him, the way he’s sitting just barely on the edge of the mattress on the lower bunk. The way his big hands lay flat on his knees. The sparkle in his eyes, too. It’s the first time Tom has ever thought this way about an adult before.
“Welcome,” Henry says.
Tom sits on the bench. Between them is a small table. And on that table is a notebook.
“Where’s your friend Nathan?” Tom asks.
“Nate? He got off.”
“Got off…the train?”
Henry smiles. “We can do that any time we want. Even you.”
Tom looks to the notebook just as Henry points at it.
“It’s just my thoughts, really,” Henry says. He acts bashful, but Tom can see the man is proud of what he has written down. “Who am I to think anybody else would give a hoot about what I have to say…Yet, after seventeen years of observations, one begins to find their own important. Especially in a world where one is told not to look.”
Observations.
Tom likes the word. He thinks of himself between cars, looking at the world through glasses he fashioned himself out of material from the office at Camp Yadin.
“I’d like to read it,” Tom says.
Truth be told, he was hoping for something a little more interesting than a notebook. Olympia would probably like this more than he would. But the pages left by the census man have done something to change Tom’s tune about the written word. And the power therein.
“Really?” Henry says. Again, a big kid. A genuine smile. Wide eyes. And those big hands that now reach for the book and slide it Tom’s way. “Feel free.”
Tom didn’t necessarily expect the man wanted him to read it right now, but where else does he have to be? Mom doesn’t know he’s in here, and that’s good enough for now. If Henry wants Tom to know his thoughts on the creatures, on the world, why not? He can tell Henry doesn’t think like Malorie does. Not at all. For starters, he’s not wearing a fold and hasn’t asked Tom about one yet. Then there’s the lack of anxiety, ever present in Malorie. That stiff sense of rules.
Tom flips the notebook open. As he does, he hears Malorie standbys.
Even a drawing might drive you insane.
Are there photos in this book? Should Tom wear his glasses?
“Don’t worry,” Henry says, as if he’s completely read Tom’s mind. “No pictures in there. Only words.”
Still, Malorie would be worried.
Even a description might do it, Tom.
He tries to shake off thoughts of Malorie as Henry reads his mind again.
“A mother like the one you described upon entering my room sounds like one who is perhaps not made for the new world. Please, I don’t mean to offend when I speak this way, but I’ve always talked openly and honestly and I’m not going to change that now. It sounds to me your mother would be better off as a hermit.”
Tom thinks Henry’s exactly right. On the first page of the open notebook he reads:
THOUGHT
S ON HOW THIS ALL BEGAN: HYSTERIA IN DROVES
Tom can’t tell if the words make him uneasy or if he’s just so excited to be here, talking to a stranger about the creatures, that his stomach is turning.
He reads on. But what he reads must be impossible. Henry writes as if he’s seen one, a creature, before.
Tom looks to him. To the big kid who is no longer smiling but whose face seems to be all eyes beneath the shadow of the upper bunk.
“No doubt some of the observations therein will be difficult to believe, given the upbringing you’ve had,” Henry says. “But the more you read, and the more you experience the concept that they are, in fact, observable, the less unfathomable they become. And isn’t that just it? Doesn’t your mother tell you that you can’t look at them because you can’t understand them, that your mind is too small to do it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Tom,” Henry says. He leans forward, his features emerging from those shadows. “I’m allowed. Do you know what that words means, given this context?”
Allowed. Tom thinks of the woman Athena Hantz in Indian River. She claimed to simply accept the creatures. Even to live with one. Has Henry done the same?
“Yes.”
Henry nods.
“And my permission doesn’t stem from some biological lottery.” He points a finger to his right temple. “It’s born up in here.”
Tom, electrified, understands.
“So,” Tom says, “then…you’ve seen one?”
Henry smiles. But his eyes do not.
“Many.”
For the first time in his life, Tom can’t believe his ears.
“What…” he starts, then he’s out with it. “What are they like?”
Henry holds Tom’s gaze for what feels like a long time. Tom expects the man to break out with enthusiasm, to stand up, to gesticulate as he describes them. Instead, it feels like something frosty occurs within Henry’s head, and his eyes go cold with it.
“Why don’t you try your glasses?” Henry says.
Tom laughs. Nervously. Here he’s in this stranger’s room, a man who repudiates every fiber of Malorie’s being, a man who breaks another rule with every single thing he does and says, a man who somehow intuited the glasses were more than old-world eyewear.
“You wore them between cars,” Henry says. “I saw you. As you looked at the world your way. And did you see anything out there to drive you mad? Are you mad, Tom?”
“I’m not. No.”
“Of course you’re not. Let’s imagine for a moment that I’d been raised without the knowledge of the existence of whales. Would the sight of one, a leviathan rising from the deep, have been enough to drive me insane? If I were to encounter one, alone, out in a dinghy, the beast coming up beneath me, would that have been enough to have stolen my sanity?”
“I don’t—”
“I think it might’ve been. The fear alone, the moment of disbelief, reality forever cracked. But you see, Tom, I do know about whales. I was raised with the knowledge of them. We all were. So when the creatures came and people lost their minds, I reminded myself of this, I saw things this way. As if I’d always known them. And that’s all there was to it. I wouldn’t allow them to surprise me. I didn’t let them confuse me. You and your sister, you two were raised in a world where they exist. Doesn’t that make them fathomable?”
“Yeah.”
“More than that even, huh. As commonplace as trees. You ever hear how, in the old world, the older generations didn’t know what to make of new technology? And so they quit using it or didn’t ever start in the first place? It’s not that they were actually incapable of using a video camera. It’s that they chose not to. This,” Henry waves a hand, “all this is a choice. Your mother doesn’t have to live by the fold, as modern people have come to call it. And she certainly doesn’t need to force you to live by it at all. Can I see those glasses?”
The question comes suddenly, but Tom isn’t put off. Everything Henry says is making sense to him. The man is connecting with Tom on a level nobody ever has. Is this what Indian River is like?
“Here,” he says. He hands over the glasses. Henry examines them, flips them over, tries them on. When he looks at Tom, Tom smiles. But Henry doesn’t. His face is stone behind Tom’s invention.
Henry removes the glasses.
“Have you tried them yet? Have you really gone out with them, stared out the window, anything of that nature?”
Tom reddens. He’s embarrassed. Why hasn’t he tried them out?
Malorie.
“Well,” Henry says, “I have a surprise for you. But you cannot tell a soul!” He raises a finger.
“Promise,” Tom says.
Henry hands Tom his glasses back, gets up from the lower bunk, and steps to the wall. Where there was once a window is now a slate of black metal. Henry places his hands flat to the metal, looks to Tom, then shifts the plate so that a triangle of sunlight enters the cabin.
“Here’s your chance,” Henry says. “The big world, waiting for you to take a look.”
Tom hears a hundred warnings in Malorie’s voice. As if she were sitting inside his head.
I’m the only person you can trust. The house you were born in went mad. The school we thought was safe went mad. And wherever we go, if there are other people there, that place will go mad, too. Do you understand?
Yes, Mommy. (Always yes, always.)
Because there are men and women out there who maybe once lived like we do but got sick of it and so they gave up. And there are men and women out there who never believed it in the first place. Do you understand?
Yes.
Good. Because those are the people who got lazy. Some after the creatures arrived. And some long before.
“Tom?” Henry says.
From where he sits Tom can’t see the window, can’t see outside. But he sees the light.
Malorie, in his head, louder:
There’s a way to go about what you’re trying to do. The man you were named after pushed back, too. But never without the fold. He never got lazy. Do you understand?
“Yes,” he says, actually, out loud.
Henry smiles. And opens a palm to the glass.
“Carpe diem, Tom.”
Tom feels like his whole life has led up to this moment. Here’s a man, an adult, not Malorie, whose philosophy rings true. Here’s a man who is able to articulate the things Tom has never been able to. Here’s a man giving him the chance to test not only his glasses, but his resolve, his spine, his perspective of what Malorie calls the new world but is the only one to Tom.
He puts the glasses on.
Malorie stands up in his head.
Maybe she shouldn’t have slapped him. But Tom’s glad she did. Glad because it was the slap he needed to leave the room, leave her side, to cut the apron strings, to set off alone. And maybe he was supposed to meet Henry. And maybe Henry was supposed to meet him. And maybe Tom was meant to walk up to this window, right now, and to look out, to see whatever it is Henry sees, to prove to himself that all these feelings, all these ideas, have come from a true place after all.
“What is it?” Henry asks. He’s looking at Tom. Tom sees him through his own glasses. Glasses that suddenly feel strange on his face. Like a mask. Like something silly that Olympia would roll her eyes at.
But Tom wants this moment. He wants to look out this window before Malorie comes to this room and drags him back into her way of life forever. If he doesn’t act now, right now, when will he?
Tom steps to the glass.
Henry steps out of the way.
Tom leans toward the window.
And he hears them outside.
A lot of them.
“What is it?” Henry asks.
Tom doesn’t know what to say. He wants to try hi
s invention, but not when he knows…so many…outside…
Henry shifts the plate over the glass again.
“Tell you what,” he says. “Why don’t we go somewhere where this type of thing is not only tolerated, but encouraged.” He steps closer to Tom. “Do you know where we are…right now?”
Tom shakes his head no. He has no idea. He’s spent the last ten years in a former summer camp.
Henry makes a mitten of his hand, shaped like Michigan, and points to the center of his middle finger.
“Indian River,” he says.
He smiles.
Tom’s heart is beating too hard. This is too much.
“You’ve heard of it?” Henry asks.
“Yes!” Breathless.
Henry nods.
“I could guide you there. You can show them your glasses. People who will appreciate what you’ve done.”
“Have…have you been?” Tom asks.
Henry laughs.
“I’ve lived there.” Then, “What do you say, Tom? Change your life? Start living your own…no longer your mother’s?”
Tom brings a hand to his face, to where Malorie slapped him.
“Yes,” Tom says. “I wanna do that. I wanna start living my own. Right now.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Olympia doesn’t have to look out a window to know the train is nearly surrounded by creatures.
She hears them.
There’s a difference, she’s learned, between the steps of a deer and those of the things that have nearly driven her mother insane the old way. It isn’t so much the weight as it is the width, the breadth of a step and the intent (or lack thereof) within.
Yes, she knows they’re surrounded. It sounds like hundreds outside the train. Enough to be heard above the wheels.
Malorie is not back. This doesn’t mean she hasn’t found Tom yet, but it probably does. Olympia doesn’t want to believe her brother could’ve left the train, but she also understands that Malorie has never slapped him before, either. What might Tom be thinking right now?
It’s impossible for her not to compare real life with the words and pages of writers from the old world. And adding to this is the number of “coming of age” stories she’s found. Dozens of novels in which the boy or girl found themselves by the end, their purpose, their future. Is Tom on a similar precipice?
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