by Lauren Groff
Why is nobody else down there welcoming Handy back? Bit says.
We’re all fed up with Handy’s shit, Hannah says. I’m not the leader, but my word is your command. Everyone must work, but freeloaders are welcome in Arcadia. Fucking Cockaigne Day. A community based on work, but I get to spend all day up in my fancy room, high as a kite, sticking my dick into any of the chicks who will lay down in front of me.
Hannah, Abe says.
Hannah snaps, What? I know you think the same thing.
Yes, he says. I’ve never heard you say the word dick before. Cussing becomes you.
She says, Ha! and kisses him, very slowly, on the forehead.
Now she sits on the bed and says, Stone family meeting. Item one and only. Do we stay or do we go?
For an hour, they debate. Carefully, cautiously. With Handy out of the picture, they can change Arcadia; if they stay, they will have to shoulder the crippling debt. If everyone works their asses off, they can survive the winter; how can they work with so few people left? They love Arcadia with all their hearts; their hearts are so very tired.
They decide to not decide. They will stay, and if staying becomes unbearable, they will go.
Bit tries to wait for Helle at night. They have to talk, but she doesn’t come back from wherever she is disappearing to. In the mornings, he sits outside the room she shares with Jincy and Muffin, but she doesn’t emerge. She is a smooth white fish, darting away from him. He wakes at midnight shaking from another nightmare, and rises. The moon is full and cold. He tries to run but gives up, the rock in his stomach too heavy. He finds his way into the thick, watchful woods. There is the familiar press upon him, the eyes from the dark. The menace could kill him. He walks until he finds himself at Verda’s and knocks on her door. She is up sleepless also, making cornbread muffins. He sits at the woodstove in her blanket, Eustace curled around his feet. Verda reads him and says nothing. At last, after he has picked apart his muffin and held the tea until it is lukewarm, she says, Even when you think you can’t bear it, you can bear it.
He doesn’t say anything.
Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles, she says. Believe me. I have been where you are. This is something I do know.
In the morning, the Pink Piper roars to life. Peanut and Clay have spent all night getting it into working shape. Astrid is going back to the Midwifery School in Tennessee with all the Pregnant Ladies, the midwives. She and Handy have one last kiss on the porch. He says, I hate that this whole thing is over.
Still, there is—what? the release of losing? the hope in devastation?—in his face.
The lawyer will be in touch, you know, Astrid says.
She kisses her children. When Helle says, Take me with you, Astrid says, You must have your year in Norway. It will be grand for you. Margrete is very tough and will help you mend your ways, my girl. You are too wild.
Ike, unabashed, weeps, and Bit can do nothing but pat his shoulder until he calms.
When Astrid boards the bus, Lila goes with her. Hiero stays. Arcadia feels like a book with the pages ripped out, the cover loose in Bit’s hands.
Titus and his family drive off before lunch, cramped in a Volkswagen van that had been such a beater even the Motor Pool had left it for dead at one corner of the lot. It may be, Bit thinks, the van he was born in. Jincy and Wells hitch into Syracuse, but not before Jincy bends to hug Bit. I love you, she says. I’ll find you. At a loss, he kisses her hands again and again, his wild-haired sister. Muffin goes with her mothers, screaming. The Free Store is unmonitored for two days until Abe presses people into shifts there, and in that time, things are taken from the shelves with nothing to replace them. Good things: knives and pouches of tobacco, candy bars and handkerchiefs, handmade pillows and afghans, gone. They wake to find more people missing. Tarzan. Peanut. Clay. Harrison, whose charges are dropped. More and more, faster and faster. The Ado Unit echoes, rooms empty. Only two hundred people eat supper that night.
Handy disappears the afternoon he is supposed to return for his trial. For hours, Cole and Bit and Dylan talk over Handy’s flight through Vermont, up into Canada, growing breathless at the thought of his being an outlaw. But Helle and Ike trail back into the Common Room at midnight, limp. With a weary air, Helle says, I drove us. And we went all the way to Niagara Falls after we dropped him off, just to see the waterfall.
They stare at her. You took Handy to Canada? Cole says.
I wanted to keep going to Canada, says Ike. But he insisted on going to the jail.
And you know what he said? Helle says. Right as he got out of the car? He said, Be good, kiddos, that’s what he said.
There was no Stay strong, and brave, my beautiful children. No I love you, Ike says, trying to make a joke of it.
Helle looks at her brother with Astrid’s cold eyes. That’s because he doesn’t, she says.
Bit grabs Helle’s hand as she stands to go to bed with the other girls. She sits back down beside him and watches the doors close. You’re mad at me, she says when they are alone.
I am, he says. He means, he thinks, stealing the marijuana; but when he says it, he sees the pool of darkness, the bodies silvered with moonlight.
She opens her mouth, she closes it again. When she speaks, she seems unstuffed, a pillow that has lost its feathers. I thought you knew who I was. I’m so sorry, Bit, she whispers. I didn’t know you thought we were together like that.
Together? he says.
She frowns. Isn’t that what you mean? Me with other boys.
No, he says, though his heart mutters, Liar.
What, then? she says.
The pot, he says. That you stole. That we couldn’t fucking sell, Helle, and now we’re as poor as ever. You’re the only one I told.
She hunches her thin shoulders up until her neck is gone. She closes her eyes and seems to shrink. When she pulls herself to standing, she says, Does it really even matter? I mean, she says, gesturing out at Arcadia with both hands, does it? In the end?
Bit is on the rock in the Pond as the other Ados dabble in the too-warm water. He feels old. The spores of milkweed gust in on the wind and fold themselves flat when they touch the surface. On boulders a hundred feet away, Armand Hammer sits, king of the Runaways. His buddies strip off, dive into the pond. Alone, he pulls from a knapsack at his feet the biggest plastic bag of marijuana Bit has ever seen. Armand sees Bit looking and grins, his upper lip touching the nail that sticks through his nose.
Want some? Armand calls out. Ten bucks for the whole bag. I got a shitload more in the woods.
Where did you get that? Bit says.
Armand shrugs and says, Someone told me some asshole was using the Sugarshack to cure it. And so I helped myself.
It’s not yours, Bit says.
Armand says, What’s your deal, man? It’s a fucking commune, it’s everyone’s.
Bit doesn’t know how he gets from his rock to Armand’s so fast. He doesn’t know how hard a face can feel against a hand, how teeth can split a fist, how fury can make even Bit, a half a head smaller than Armand and forty pounds lighter, the stronger boy. He hits until something goes loose in his head, and he flies backward, a trickle forming in his eyes, and he sees Cole and Ike and Dylan and Harrison and Fiona come sealing wetly up out of the water, hopeless skinny hippie kids about to get knocked off their blocks. From where he lies in the cool space between two boulders, Bit sees Helle standing, white and apart, not even looking at the fracas. She is looking only at Bit. She bends as if from a great height, and he closes his eyes to feel her fingers on his face.
Bit takes a trash bag of weed to Hannah and Abe’s room. His mother is sitting on her bed, hands between her legs, looking heavy. He puts the bag on the bed beside her, and when she looks up, she takes in his split knuckles, his bloody head, the eyes squeezing shut under their bruises. She kisses his hurt hands. Thank you, she says, but she’s not smiling.
Now we can sell it, Hannah, he says. We can pay our debt.
For a long while she says nothing, and when she speaks, it’s in a whisper that he has to lean closely to hear. Too little, she says. Too late.
In the night there is the sound of breaking glass on the first floor. In the morning, they find the windows of the Eatery smashed out and down the hill the Runaway Quonset kicked down. It looks like a tornado went through it, Cole reports. Sheets and cots and mattresses all split and twisted and wet. All of the Runaways are gone. Soon, the Trippies vanish, most of the Newbies go home, or to other communes, hitching to cities, rejoining the world.
Ike is not in their room. Cole and Bit search the Pond, the Bakery with its few loaves of golden bread, the Soy Dairy, the Octagonal Barn, the Showerhouse. They walk the fields for him, check the Gatehouse, where Titus’s old badger smell still hangs in the air.
At last, Cole says, Waterfall, and he and Bit check the sun. If they start now and trot, they can make it there and back before dark. Bit has matches in his pocket. Cole has a little gorp in a paper bag.
They go through the forests, through the afternoon. They stop once for wild blackberries that stain their teeth and hands, and keep on. At last, they hear the tremendous pour. The air goes clammy, plants grow up the length of trees, rocks they’re jogging over turn slippery. Around the bend and there it is, the tallest thing Bit has seen, forty feet of falling water. It surprises him every time, its power and spin and foam, the deafening crash and split of the water on the rocks. The lick of the ferns in the misted air. The strange, kind softness of the very atmosphere. A pulse of pleasure goes through Bit that ends with tears shivering in his eyes and a hurried swipe with his sleeve.
Cole and Bit scale the cliff, clutching at roots and ferns, and heave themselves over the edge. Ike is sitting in his jeans in the shallow water, five feet from the drop. They pick their way to him carefully: the current is strong enough to carry them over the edge. In more carefree times, when they jumped into the pool, they had to aim with precision or their bodies would smash into the rocks below. They sit on either side of Ike, who says nothing. The skin of his arms is bluish and pocked with goosebumps. Bit wonders how long he has been sitting here.
Above the treetops, the sky turns woolly, a slick dark silver. Sun pokes through holes in the cloud cover and fingers the distant ground. Bit feels prickles behind his ears, as if he’s being watched. A bobolink calls. A doe steps to the pool below, and after a moment, so do her fawns.
Ike says, They don’t want me. None of them. My parents.
This is not the time to lie, and the boys say nothing. For a long time they sit like this, together, in the rush of the stream and watch the water anneal at the edge, hear it break upon itself below.
They come out when Ike is shuddering with cold, and Bit makes as grand a fire as he can. Ike clutches his bare legs to his chest, his pants steaming in the heat. He pulls a little bag of weed from his shirt pocket, and Cole gets busy with it.
The daylight emerges for one last breath, syruping the valley. There is a movement in the trees, and they look up with alarm, thinking bears, when two boys step out onto the bank. They aren’t Arcadians: they’re wearing overalls and linen blouses, and are as tall as Cole and broad in the shoulders. One throws the stick he’s been peeling into the fire with a shy underhanded toss. The other crouches down. Bit is alert, wary, waiting for a sudden move.
But the first boy just says Hi? and Cole lets out a snoutful of smoke and says, Heya.
Heya, the other one repeats. He is dark-haired and younger than his brother.
No English, the first says, the one with a gap between his teeth. Amos boys? Amos Two, John, he says, pointing at himself, his brother.
Oh, dig, yeah, Cole says. We know Amos. He’s cool. You’re his sons.
The crouching boy looks at the roach going to Bit’s mouth. Bit inhales, considers, offers it to him.
The boy takes a big lungful and begins to hack it out. Cole grins at him, and Bit hides his laugh in a fist, and then the young one steps forward and takes a big inhale, and lets it out, coughing only a little.
Bit watches the sturdy boys with their square faces and knuckles. The Oldest Utopianists, Hannah said once, watching the Amish men who came to help with the harvest: for generations, they’ve lived the most perfect lives they can believe in. Bit imagines meals of animal flesh and hard chores and a huge family and girl cousins in demure frocks. What a relief it would be to live always among family. To be among people who all look like you, think like you, behave like you, have the same God to love and fear, a God angry enough to smite and loving enough to give, a God with an ear big enough to hold the secrets you whisper into it, who lets you empty yourself and walk back into your life, infinitely lighter. He feels loss for something he’s never known.
They sit, companionably, passing the joint. The world darkens more. At some signal, the Amish boys stand and nod at the Arcadians and disappear into the woods, back toward their safe, solid houses, back to their families.
Ike puts on his dryish pants, Cole kicks dirt over the embers of the fire. They begin to walk fast, homeward. Bit holds his words in for as long as Ike needs him to. They are halfway home before Ike looks at his friends. His face is baggy; for miles, his stomach has been audibly rumbling.
Those Amish dopes were so fucking weird, Ike says and begins to laugh.
Cole gives his little whinny. Bit finds himself laughing, too, laughing and laughing until tears spring to his eyes and he has to lean against a tree to stop it, or he will piss. When they’re quiet, the boys look helplessly at one another. They feel tired in their very bones.
Those mofos, Cole says. They’re even weirder than we’re going to be out in the real world.
Bit begins to shiver, though they are going quickly enough to warm themselves. He feels sick, wants to break into a trot, a gallop, a sprint. He cannot imagine himself in the Outside. Because, he can admit it now, no matter how he strains his brain, he cannot imagine the greater world at all. He is not ready.
Night has fallen when they come up into the Eatery. They have missed their dinner. The kitchen is dark and empty. But they find a note on the stainless-steel counter: Hannah had saved plates in the oven and a whole loaf of bread, just for them. Bit hides the note in his pocket so Ike won’t see how his mother wrote I love you at the bottom and feel his own lack.
They are just finished when Helle comes into the kitchen, her cheeks glassy. Ike, she whispers, Margrete’s here.
In blows an old woman, straight and white, Astrid but smaller, the air around her dense. There is a power to her. A witchiness. Her mouth telegraphs rules, hard chairs, cold-water showers, feline familiars with bladder troubles. You come now, Isaac, she says in Astrid’s accent, comically exaggerated.
Ike stands and towers over his grandmother. She pats his cheek and goes out. Air returns to the room.
Ike says, I’m not saying goodbye. Goodbye means never again, and I’ll see you in weeks. Months, at most. He turns his back on his friends and rushes out.
Helle hugs Cole for a long time, too long, Bit thinks. When she comes to hug Bit, he drowns in her vanilla, her dreads making a tent around his face. Her retainer is a flash on her tongue. He has grown, he sees with a startle: he can almost see level into her golden eyes.
Don’t forget, she says, leaning her forehead against his. Me.
I couldn’t, he says.
If you do, it’ll be like I’ve never existed at all.
He’s all knotted up. She kisses him, sharp of teeth, touch of tongue, hands cold on the back of his neck. He wants to tell her so much that he can’t say anything; if he does, he will spill out onto the ground. She holds his hand and Cole’s as they go down the slate steps to the car waiting on the gravel. Before she turns, he pulls out the photograph he’s been carrying in a plastic bag, pinned to the inside of his shorts. He puts it in her hand. It is Helle at the Pond, so early in the morning she thought she was alone, standing naked on the rock, reflected in the glassy water. A taper with a shock o
f blond dreadlocks at each end, so beautiful, beauty was no longer the word for it. She looks at the picture and winces; she braves a look at his face, and with a terrifying swoop in the chest, he knows she understands. Ike has a pillow over his eyes and won’t look when they knock on the glass.
Helle gets in, the car gentles off. Out of the darkness at the edge of the wood there steps a giant, which is caught now in the headlights and shines. It is an old man, comically bug-eyed, fork-bearded, with bendy spaghetti arms. It waves and bows in graceful, almost human movements. When the car passes beyond and the darkness steals back out from where it had hidden at the edge of the woods, Bit sees Leif under the puppet, still dancing in the dark.
They are one hundred. Regina and Ollie bought a truck in Ilium, a beautiful, sleek Ford with a huge bed. They go to the Bakery in the middle of the night and take the industrial mixers and one of the ovens before anyone has time to stop them. The next day, two old people in a Jaguar show up for Scott and Lisa, and before they are allowed in the car, they must take off their Arcadia clothes and put on new ones, khakis and a button-up shirt and blazer for Scott, a dress and panty hose for Lisa. Bit watches, heartstruck, as Scott and Lisa climb into the backseat and hold hands, and smile uncomfortably at their knees as the driver in his boat shoes and golf pants roars at them, choleric, speeding off.
Hannah says, I always suspected they were secret Republicans.
They were your friends, Bit says.
Friends, Hannah says. What a word.
There are sixty left. The tomatoes rot on the vine.
The toilets back up in Arcadia House, and there is no Horse or Hank to fix them. The smell drives out thirty Arcadians. Hannah makes dinner by herself, out of what they have: tempeh from the freezer, a few cans of beans, some boiled cabbage.
The next day, Sweetie comes to the Ado Unit, trailing Dyllie. His little face is electric with nerves. He is pale, almost as pale as his brother. Sweetie seems heavy with her sorrow and runs her hands over Cole’s head, the hair sparking with static electricity under her palms. We’re going, Cole, she says. A girlfriend of mine’s going to take us to the city.