by Andrew Smith
What was she doing? She was making me crazy. Couldn’t she see I was in the process of melting into useless goo?
I did what she said. I squeezed the condom packet.
“It feels weird,” I said.
“You’re shaking.”
“This is kind of awkward, Mel.”
“Why is it awkward, Arek? I don’t understand you at all,” she said.
Mel was right. Too much had changed in me since I left the hole. And none of this would have ever happened if she hadn’t stowed away inside my lifeboat. But I couldn’t imagine being out here, this far away from the hole, tossed on these seas without her.
I never would have lasted.
And my penis felt like it was about to snap into pieces. Why did this have to happen to me? I willed myself to not look down at my lap. I would have passed out if Mel had said anything about what was so obviously going on inside number 42’s basketball shorts.
Mel tore open the packet and pulled out the oily little dome-shaped object.
It looked like a creature from a nightmare.
“It smells weird,” Mel said.
She stuck the thing under my nose.
“Um. Yeah. Weird.”
“You are so red, Arek.”
“Sorry. I can’t help it.”
Hopefully, Mel had no idea about all the things at that moment I couldn’t help from happening in my body.
“I think it’s cute when you get embarrassed.”
“Um. I’m not.”
Mel laughed. Loud.
She said, “So. You put this on the top of your penis, and then you roll it down. Like this.”
Mel began unrolling the condom over her thumb.
It was wrinkly and slick with oil.
Mel said, “You should feel this.”
She fluttered the little greasy tube in front of me.
“No thanks.”
She kept unrolling it.
And then she said, “Are penises really this big?”
I sighed. “Can we put this away now?”
Mel shrugged. “Whatever. But I still think you should put one on if you have trouble with your semen making a mess when you sleep.”
“Mel. Please.”
“I’m just trying to help, Arek.”
“Let’s look through the rest of the stuff, then. I think we’ve discovered enough information about extra-sensitive ultra-thin condoms,” I said.
“You are very sensitive, Arek.”
“Uh.”
Mel got up from the bed and reached down into the nonfood barrel. I was so relieved.
“Look. They have tampons, too.”
“Please. Please, don’t open them, Mel.”
“I don’t need to. You already know what they’re for.”
Fortunately, Mel spent about twenty minutes going through the survival gear, so my blood pressure dropped to normal, which was still messed up, considering I was a sixteen-year-old boy with an uncontrollable penis.
I said, “It’s getting late. We should start moving this stuff into the van, and we can finally cook some dinner.”
“Oh. So you can stand up now?” Mel asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I felt my cheeks getting hot again.
Mel said, “Nothing.”
There Are Bound to Be Snakes
Max Beckmann also painted Adam and Eve.
It was one of the first works the painter produced after coming out of the hole of World War I. He painted Adam and Eve in 1917.
Maybe it was because of the paintings in our library or the book we had about his work, or maybe it was something else, but I have always felt my life connected with Max Beckmann’s—that the models he had constructed had something to do with the models I constructed.
Max Beckmann’s Adam and Eve, like many of his after-the-hole paintings, is claustrophobic and dark. It seems as though Max Beckmann used only one ashy color to capture the image. In it, the distorted figures of Adam and Eve stand at the trunk of a tree. The tree seems dead and cold, and Adam’s eyes are completely black, as though they have been cut from the cloth of a starless night. He is emaciated, starving; and Eve, opposite him, has her eyes lowered, lifting one of her round breasts toward Adam, her mouth slightly open as though she is saying something. Eve appears to be pregnant in the painting. The couple were Max Beckmann’s cautionary idea of the world’s new humans after the Great War. Around the trunk of the tree coils the body of a serpent, its head poised just above Eve’s. But the serpent has a doglike snout. It snarls, baring teeth. Maybe the serpent is whispering to Eve. And one of the only primary colors in the work is the ring of the serpent’s eye—a blazing red. The only other, yellow, is on the bloom of a lily that sprouts up from the dead ground behind Adam’s feet. Both Adam and Eve, naturally, are completely naked. In many ways, Max Beckmann’s Adam and Eve shows the first two humans who came up to the surface of earth, after the hole.
“What do you think of that?” my dad—Austin—had asked me.
I was fourteen at the time. He, Robby, and I were talking about the Beckmann book in the library.
My two fathers, who loved each other very much, smoked cigarettes.
The others in the hole had come to accept that the boys’ general routine after dinner was to retreat into the library, as though it were some kind of private place of discussion for the three of us. Mom and Wendy clearly resented it but did nothing to interfere with the private time I shared with my fathers.
Robby sat between us, on the library’s small leather couch.
Dad put his arm around Robby’s shoulders so that his hand touched me.
“Is it a model meant to represent the story of Adam and Eve, or is this the actual story itself?” I asked.
“We have a very philosophical son,” Robby said.
“I think it’s Max Beckmann’s actual story. Right here. On this page,” Dad said.
“It’s a good story, but not a happy one,” I said.
My fathers kissed each other, and Robby put his hand in Dad’s hair.
I continued. “You always say how we’re like Adam and Eve—Mel and me. But I hope we aren’t like the people in Max Beckmann’s painting.”
“Well, I mean that you and Mel are like the first humans on earth. You are the new people, without the baggage everyone carried with them, without end, from before. Beckmann’s Adam and Eve still carried those burdens,” Dad, who could straddle time, said.
“Before the hole and after the hole,” I said.
“Yes. Max Beckmann’s Adam and Eve are before-the-hole people. There’s a hint of a promise they will not make the same mistakes, but only a small hint.”
“But then there’s the snake, too. So, no chance,” I said.
“You won’t make those mistakes, Arek,” Robby said.
“I hope not.”
Then I asked, “Dad, how old were you the first time you had sex?”
Dad got his before-the-hole eyes. He looked at Robby, then at me, and said, “You mean with someone else?”
“Duh. Yes,” I said.
“Why?” Dad looked concerned. He asked, “Did you have sex, Arek?”
I admit his question frustrated me a little. “You mean with someone else? There is no one else, Dad.”
“Oh.”
And Robby said, “He was fifteen. I was sixteen. It was the first time for both of us. Your dad stayed the night at my house, because my mom was away. It was such a perfect night. I was so in love with your dad. And know this, Arek, we both wanted to have sex. We talked about it, and both of us said yes, which is the way it should always happen.”
“Who asked first?” I said.
“Austin did,” Robby said.
Dad, almost simultaneously, answered, “Robby.”
Robby shook his head. He bit the inside of his lower lip. “But after it, the next day, your father avoided me and wouldn’t speak about it.”
Dad didn’t smile or look away from me.
He said, �
�I was confused and scared afterward, because I felt so guilty about everything.”
I did not know what guilt felt like. Dad could see I didn’t understand the word.
So he said, “Guilt was something from all the rules before we came here. Guilt was because you did something good that the rules said was bad, or because you did something bad that you knew was good.”
I said, “Oh.”
• • •
I cooked beans and rice for Mel, and we stayed that night parked in front of the burned-down condom house in Rome.
The food was good. It was what we needed after not eating for more than a day.
Cooking dinner for Mel made me happy. It made me happier than I’d ever been since that day my two fathers took me fishing through a hole in the ice at Clear Lake.
I never wanted to go back to the hole, and I was determined not to make the same mistakes that Max Beckmann’s Adam and Eve made. The world was a new place, full of yellow lilies, everywhere, without end.
Mel and I didn’t talk about her falling asleep next to me in my bed that night we watched the movie about birds, the night I snuck away with a bottle of whiskey and nearly died. It wasn’t that either of us felt guilty, or at least that’s what I believed. But after that, Mel stayed in her bed, and I stayed in mine.
The mature and responsible part of me, which admittedly was not much—the part that planned things out about getting food and fuel, the part that considered which direction we were going—that part of me knew this was the right thing to do. But every particle of the rest of me wanted to feel Mel’s body next to mine, to be tangled up with her in the sheets of a bed I’d just as soon never leave.
After dinner, I took a shower and got ready for bed. I was exhausted and full. When I came out of the shower, I was dressed in new green-and-yellow boxer shorts with John Deere tractors on them and a T-shirt I’d taken from my dads’ BMW. I was determined to put an end to feeling embarrassed or inhibited around Mel. I was committed to replacing the after-the-hole Arek with the Arek who’d grown up openly sharing everything in his life with Mel.
Mel sat at the little eating area beside the sink. She was wearing the basketball clothes we’d taken for her from Henry A. Wallace Middle School.
“You look good in basketball clothes. We would have a good basketball team, Mel,” I said.
Then I felt the heat rising into my face.
“Thank you, Arek. You look good in . . . um . . . your boxers.”
Mel stared at me. I watched how her eyes went all the way down the length of my body. I half expected her to say something about if I had an erection, or if I thought I should put on a condom before I got inside my bed, just in case.
What she said was, “I read the rules about how to play Yahtzee.”
“Does it sound dangerous?”
Mel laughed a little. I loved hearing that as much as I loved any sound ever.
She said, “It looks like fun. Do you want to play?”
“Does it involve throwing bags of rocks at anyone’s balls?”
She smiled and shook her head. “No. There’s a cup with these little cubes with dots on them, though.”
“How many cubes? How much do they weigh?”
“Stop it.”
“It sounds like it has the potential to inflict pain.”
“Don’t be dumb. Sit down.”
I sat beside Mel, resisting the urge to fake an accidental touch, and then immediately damning myself for being so uptight and inhibited.
We played the game for hours until we were so tired we could no longer do the simple addition required by the rules.
Then Mel crawled into her little bed, and I went to mine.
“Good night, Mel. Thank you for teaching me how to play that game. I think it was probably—oh, I don’t know. Good night.”
“You’re welcome, Arek. Good night.”
I had almost drifted off to sleep.
“Arek?”
“What?”
“Do you think I tease you too much?”
“Probably not enough, considering all the rules I break.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, Mel.”
It turned out that Yahtzee was probably the greatest thing we had discovered that had been invented by before-the-hole humans.
Who knew it could be like this?
Who knew what else could possibly be out here?
Snakes, I thought.
There are bound to be snakes.
A Roof over Your Heads, and a Bucket
One of the deepest rooms inside the maze of sets in Doc Sawbones’ Field Amputation House of Horrors! was called Camp Sumter.
The real Camp Sumter was also known as Andersonville Prison, a notorious place where thirteen thousand captive soldiers died horrible deaths in the American Civil War.
The first night they were there, the room called Camp Sumter became Breakfast and Olive’s prison cell inside the lightless and awful former amusement park attraction.
Breakfast, who was clever for a boy who’d never heard or read about nonhuman primates, cooperated with Mimi and Edsel. Breakfast, always alert, and a quick learner when it came to such things as the contents of septic service pumper trucks, was waiting for an opportunity when Edsel and Mimi lowered their guard. They escorted him and Olive at gunpoint out to the pond at the Battle of Hampton Roads Thrill Ride!, where, during the time that Edsel and Mimi were employees of Rebel Land, no fewer than three rule-breaking and overly tall Tennessee fun seekers had been decapitated by cannonballs.
Breakfast dove into the shallow, murky water, and within seconds broke the algae-carpeted surface with a wriggling black catfish in his wild little hands.
“Look at that!” Mimi hollered. “That boy is a wild critter!”
Breakfast tossed the fish onto the sidewalk, and Edsel used the butt of his pistol to club it senseless.
“I am wild,” Breakfast said.
He took a breath and went under again and again, until he’d thrown four fat fish out to his captors. Olive jumped up and down and waved at Breakfast every time the boy came back up.
And he was covered with leeches for the second time since he came to this place. Breakfast picked and cursed and blew snot from his nostrils, while Olive examined him and gently plucked—and ate—her share of leeches from the boy’s back and legs.
Edsel and Mimi made Breakfast carry the fish back to their house, but they cautiously decided not to risk handing him a knife, so Mimi gutted and prepared them herself. Then she threw the guts, skin, heads, and fins out into the Sharpsburg room for the rats, who would eat anything.
Mimi was pleased with herself, but Breakfast thought she was a terrible cook.
The four of them ate the charred crumbles of catfish with their hands, directly off the tarnished surface of the old operating table beside the stove. And Edsel’s pistol lay constantly at the ready, pointed at Breakfast’s little chin. It sat just beside the picture of an eagle’s head inked on the back of the old man’s right hand.
“Tell us what you know,” Mimi said. Bits of catfish dotted her chin and hung like small ornaments from her hair.
“I know a lot,” Breakfast said. “I’m wild, and I am rich. How much money do you want to let us go?”
Edsel nearly choked. He coughed up a snotty wad of fish meat, then scooped it up with his calloused fingers and put it back in his mouth. “Money? Who the hell needs money?”
Breakfast shrugged. “Everyone needs money. Just like everyone should know how to swim and climb things and fish with their bare hands and be wild like me.”
Breakfast held up his hands like he was holding invisible grapefruit-size balls in each one and said, “Everyone.”
Then he picked his nose and scratched his balls.
“That’s some skills, little boy,” Edsel said. “What else can you do?”
Breakfast thought. “I can whistle so loud, I can kill birds and squirrels and rabbits with it.”
“Get out,” t
he old man said.
Breakfast shifted in his chair and farted. He needed to pee, too, so he just started urinating on the floor beneath the table. He was, after all, wild, and that meant Breakfast would pretty much pee on anything he wanted to pee on.
He put his index fingers in the sides of his mouth and let rip a shrill whistle that nearly drove both the insane old carnies to the brink of death.
“Quit that! Quit that now, you little fucker!” Edsel yelled. “Ow! Motherfucker!”
Olive bounced in her chair and stroked Breakfast’s arm.
Breakfast stopped whistling.
“Good goddamn, you little fuckwad! That hurt!” Edsel rubbed his hairy ears.
Outside, in the Sharpsburg room next door, a dozen rats fell dead and plopped down into the stagnant pool of festering shit on the floor.
And Mimi said, “Looks like we’ve got ourselves quite a little hunter.” Mimi waved her hand across the table, flinging bits of fish. “Well, what’s she good at?”
“Who? Olive?”
“Who in God’s name do you think I was talking about?” Mimi, who’d been in a state of heroin withdrawal for more than fifteen years, said. “The invisible saloon gal behind your chair?”
Breakfast didn’t get it. He turned around.
“Olive’s good at finding roots and plants. And the monsters are afraid of her. They’ll kill themselves cold dead rather than let her get anywhere near them.”
“You say.” Edsel didn’t believe pretty much anything Breakfast said, and Breakfast was getting tired of the old man.
“I do say,” Breakfast told him.
“You done eating, then?” Edsel asked.
“I wasn’t hungry to begin with,” Breakfast said.
Olive had already had her fill of leeches and some of the algae she’d pulled off Breakfast.
“Then come on. I’ll show you where you two can sleep.” Edsel waved the pistol at Breakfast and Olive as a kind of invisible hand to brush his guests away from the table. “It’s that way down yonder.”
There was barely any light at all that managed to ooze through the doorway of the Camp Sumter room. What light there was revealed walls made from pole-straight trees and a variety of ancient metal restraints and shackles that the former amusement park guests could lock themselves into for the purpose of snapping photographs or perhaps babysitting children while adults stole away to the nearby moonshine stands.