by Greg Hrbek
They duck into the open garage.
Flash of lightning.
Both of them nervous after having given the names; winded from the run; and now a crack of thunder—like a shot from some impossible gun—jolts their hearts. Almost gasping, they watch the rain beat violently upon the driveway.
“Who was that guy,” Dorian says.
“I dunno.”
“Some kind of Aryan?”
“Well, he’s not from Greenpeace, is he …”
A car comes up the road, which is a sluiceway now. Tires fighting the current and churning water. After it’s gone, Plaxico says abruptly:
“Didn’t you see me looking at you?”
“What …”
Plaxico shakes his head and Dorian wants to know what he was supposed to do, just get up and leave? His best friend wanders around the cavernous space of the garage, saying nothing, finally taking an umbrella from a peg on the wall.
“What are you doing?” Dorian says.
Though it’s obvious what his friend is doing. He’s taking an umbrella from a peg on the wall. At the threshold of the garage, he pushes it open. “We shouldn’t have done that,” Plaxico says—and then he runs into the storm.
As you well know, Kathryn Wakefield: A drug is moving constantly through your bloodstream and circulating through your brain. You ingest it, in pill form, every morning, without fail. What the drug does, from a pharmocological standpoint, is: it boosts levels of seratonin (which you don’t have enough of in your synapses), allowing for successful transmission of important messages about emotion and behavior between neurons. In more human terms, its purpose is to keep you from experiencing sadness and fatigue to such a degree that your sense of reality starts to slip and you find it difficult to load a dishwasher much less shower and dress, drive twenty miles, and perform for eight hours the duties of a general counsel. In the winters—the gray cold days of the Northeastern winter—the disorder gains strength (or the drug loses power), so you have learned to increase the dosage for a five-month period. But this is not December or February. This is June.
Why is it happening now?
You go to your doctor of eight years—who, after stating the obvious (you usually feel pretty good in the summer), asks you rote questions (is there a problem at work, how is everything at home) before writing a new prescription. On the way to the pharmacy, think about the answer you gave her and the one you might have given. You told her: “There have been troubles with my son, the younger one. Going back to last fall.” But the truth about Dorian is: He has scared you and worried you and made you angry, but he has not plunged you into a darkness. Depression came last winter, the punctual visitor it has always been; and left, as always, with the melting snow and the appearance in your garden of the delicate shoots of the first perennials. Now, two months later, here it is again, out of time. The reason you might have given is: The other night I got to thinking. About her … I say her. Of course, I can’t know what the sex would have been. Yet I do seem to remember having a feeling back then, a sort of theoretical inkling, of two X chromosomes, not an X and a Y. In the generic terms of science is how I tried to think. All my life, I had been moody. But in those days after, I felt as though much more than the embryo and the placenta had been removed from me. (I could call it an emptiness. But that’s not really what depression is. Depression isn’t having nothing in you: it’s the absence of things without which you feel like nothing.) Afterward, I was using up sick days and spending them in bed, curtains drawn against the sun, wanting darkness, wanting always to be asleep, which is a way of wanting to be dead. But if you wait long enough, if you can stand the wait, the missing things do get returned and you want to live in the light again. And I have been trying, ever since, to stay in the light—or at least not allow the darkness to get a good grip on me. But the other night, at the amphitheatre: I got to thinking about it, and I started feeling about it the way I had back then, and now I can’t seem to stop. Thinking: She would be twenty-six now; and eight years ago, when something happened above the Golden Gate Bridge—a thing that, even now, no one can really explain—she would have been eighteen; and she could have been there, in the city, on that day. And so I start crying, and I want to be covered by darkness at the thought. Just the chance. That had she been born, it would have been possible for her to die that way.
•
Late at night, three days after therapy, he is sitting on his bed, hypnotizing himself. Holding the coin that Dr. Khaled gave him—and pretty soon the coin is falling out of his fingers and he is in that place which she has told him he should go to in his imagination one or two or three times a day, a place which is always there and to which he can go anytime because he is in charge of his imagination: where he can always talk to his mother, because (as Dr. Khaled said) he knows her so well and they love each other so much that he is able to hear her voice and feel her love in his inner mind. What they are doing tonight is this: Sitting on the green grass alongside the shore of the lake, looking at the word of God. Not the new Qu’ran given him by his adoptive father. The one Abdul-Aziz gave him in Dakota. The front cover is torn. Some pages are water-stained, others speckled with mold. Here and there, a winged insect has been crushed into the shape of a letter from some unknown abjad; and on one page in particular (the one open before him and his mother now) there is a smear of blood where, months ago in the camp, Karim killed a mosquito that must have been feeding on him or one of his friends while he read. On this page, just above the blood, are the verses about a place of gardens and fountains, of eternal peace and safety, where hearts will be freed of hatred …
He falls asleep.
(Or perhaps he has been asleep for some time.)
When he wakes up very suddenly, he thinks he must be having a dream about waking up, because the old guy has thrown open the bedroom door and is standing at the threshold, holding a gun.
“Stay here,” he says.
“Jaddi, what.”
“Don’t go out of the house. Don’t go out of any door. Got me?” From the phone in his other hand comes the voice of a woman: “Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”
“There’s a fire on my property,” he says. Then he’s moving into the hallway, towards the stairs, and Karim hears him say the street address but can’t make out anything else. He gets up from the bed. Opens the window. The floodlights are on, shining on the swimming pool and the patio, but nothing is burning behind the house. So he goes to the room across from his own—and opening the door, sees it framed in the window: what appears at first to be a small tree on fire. Though it can’t be a tree, because there are two straight lines of flame, one vertical and one horizontal, connected, crossing at their midpoints. Not a tree. So, what is it? The boy can’t begin to guess. Having never seen such a thing, nor heard of one …
Whereas, I, across the street, knew exactly what was burning over there. Two pieces of wood nailed together, a cross, which must have been splashed with a fossil fuel before someone put a match to it. I could smell the fumes through my open window, just barely. Gasoline or kerosene. That deadly sweet odor handed down from the past, like a heritage. As I watched the thing, I was thinking of a dream from the night before. I was back at the party, but it was pouring rain. A muezzin was chanting somewhere. I knew that the song was my sister’s name in Arabic. Karim was there, but he looked like Omar. Suddenly, Keenan appeared. To help me hold him. The same way the Arab boys had held me. I could feel the rain soaking through my clothes, warm like blood; and I understood that Karim was the muezzin and if we just kept him here in this storm, he would begin to experience a sensation of drowning. Keenan was saying: Speak English, nigger. Tell us the name. Those words. Some part of my mind couldn’t stop repeating them while I watched the thing burn, brightly enough to give a pulse to everything nearby. The face of the house. The trunk and lower boughs of a maple tree. And at the foot of the driveway, The Negro. The way its shadow kept shifting in the light of the fire, it seemed to be comi
ng to life.
The next morning, a Saturday, at eight-forty, scared murderously shitless, Dorian Wakefield and Zebedee Hightower march across the cul-de-sac to kill Keenan Cartwright. The if-onlies in the situation are starting to pile up: if only you didn’t call him towelhead, if only we didn’t go to the stupid party, if only they never closed the camps in the first place. But the revisionary wish that seems most crucial at this point is: If only we didn’t give him the names. Which follows directly from: If only Keenan had kept the fuck out of it. They find the sliding glass door of the in-law apartment locked, the vertical blinds drawn across. Also the shade down on the bedroom window. After rapping on it to no effect, they go up the steps to the deck and see, in the kitchen, Mr. Cartwright, one hand holding a cup of coffee, the other down the front of his boxers, scratching.
Knock knock.
He turns, looking at them in sleepy confusion, blinking as if to blink away the hallucination of a couple of leprechauns, then finally comes to the door.
“What do you want.”
“Keenan.”
“Don’t be a smartass, Wakefield.”
Zebedee says: “We’re sorry to bother you, but his door is locked.”
“That’s cause he hasn’t unlocked it.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, what. You late for a pancake breakfast?” Then, looking at Dorian more closely, his face in particular: “Bastard got you pretty good.”
“I guess.”
(Drinking some coffee.) “I don’t suppose that could’ve been your idea last night.”
“What.”
“That little light show.”
While thinking of the burnt ground down the street, Dorian’s heart expands like a balloon, full to bursting, until this man in underwear, with enough hair on his chest and back to qualify as a member of an earlier hominoid species, finally grants them entrance to the house. Through the kitchen they go, down the stairs, into the apartment with its swamp-gas smell of prunes, and into the bedroom.
“Wake up, you idiot.”
“What …”
Zebedee says: “You have to call that friend of yours.”
“What friend.”
“The Nazi,” Dorian specifies.
Keenan, fumbling for his phone: “What the hell are you guys talking about?”
“Don’t you know,” Zeb says.
“Know what.”
Incredibly, he slept through the whole episode, including a 120-decibel fire engine siren. As they fill him in now, Keenan Cartwright’s eyes get clear and his nostrils sort of flare—and when a smile dawns on his face, a feeling moves through Dorian, a kind of emotional address to the self, that goes: You never liked him. You were in third grade together and last year in fifth. But you were never friends until the thing at the mosque. After that, while half the world was harshing on you, he was on your side. But even as the bond formed, you knew it wasn’t strong and it wouldn’t last …
“You have to call the guy,” Zeb says.
“Sure.”
“Now,” Dorian says.
Keenan raises a hand in an appeal for patience. Then, walking into the bathroom, drops his briefs and pushes down his boner. As the piss streams: “What about the other three? I wonder if they all got torched. Prob’ly not. It’d be too obvious. But that woulda been epic. You took some pictures, right?”
Dorian doesn’t answer. He watches him shake off some pale yellow drops and pull up his underwear. Watches him reenter the bedroom. Mostly naked. Still talking about pictures, when Dorian, using both hands, shoves him so hard and unexpectedly on the chest that all the boy can manage is one awkward backward skip before head and ass hit wall and floor—after which he lies there, clenching his teeth, fighting back tears, and finally looking up with the abashment of a dog that can’t understand what it did to warrant such cruelty. And Dorian does not feel a tinge of remorse as he says: “Now call the guy, you shithead, and tell him to stay away before we all wind up in fucking juvenile court.” When Zeb offers his hand to the injured, Keenan just slaps it away. Then Zebedee follows Dorian out the back door, hearing a voice telling him: You should’ve done that. But all you ever do is turn away or run away while other people fight and hate rises up from its own ashes. By what right do you take my name? I who died for you in a past of burning crosses …
•
On his front lawn, a circle of scorched earth like an impression left by a science-fictional laser beam. Could’ve been anyone. (Well, not anyone. What he means is: anyone with enough malice in him to set fire to a cross.) Happens all the time. (Well, not all the time, but pretty often, and a lot more frequently since the closing of the camps.) He just read a story the other day about a nationwide spike. Most of them supposedly the work of organized reactionary groups. Not lone wolves, not neighbors. I feel like a shit for even letting the thought occur to me. I’ve known Dorian since he was four; the kid isn’t capable of something like that. Well, not on his own, anyway. Meaning what. The Cartwright kid, or the older brother. The brother. Makes sense, doesn’t it. Maybe, but not Dorian. So Dorian is immune to anger, is he? I didn’t say that. A real dove of a kid. They worked it out, and now they’re Lifebook friends. Lifebook. The gesture means something. It means nothing. A click you can take back with a click. It wasn’t him. Sure, whatever you say. Everyone is exactly who they appear to be. Except you, right? You’re the only one with secrets … All of this to himself, within himself, while sitting on the porch, looking out at that scar on the lawn, while the sun goes down, while the sound from the trees gradually dies away, that sound which every day elicits in his mind another comparison: the din of a madhouse, he thought today, the incomprehensible ranting of the insane. Nine o’clock. Ten. The boy is upstairs. Reading calmly at his desk as if nothing of concern has occurred. Unfazed is the word. Well, why be surprised? Why would something like this frighten him? After years inside that fence. He who has sensed many a time in darkness a presence, something stalking him, almost silently, and has turned to behold it, behind and above, inhuman and unmanned, hovering and watching, seeing him with the perfect clarity of the blind, beaming at his body coded pulses of invisible light from an electro-optical infrared system, acquiring him as a target, then thinking and deciding, in the way a robot thinks and decides, if he shall live or die. A boy with such experience is supposed to be intimidated by a couple of burning two-by-fours.
By eleven o’clock, Will Banfelder is keeping watch from a room on the second floor. He sits in an armchair by a window affording a view of road, driveway, front yard; and streams on his tablet a replay of the baseball game, with the sound muted, so he can hear, through the screen of the open window, any noise from outside. Around one in the morning, the next thing will happen.
A car appears.
He doesn’t notice it at first. Because it is being driven slowly, with only the parking lights on. Then there it is. Slowing—as it comes even with the driveway and mailbox—to a crawl. He sets down the tablet. Picks up the handgun. The car is stopping now. Brake lights casting a red glow. He slides the safety pin to the left. It is an action the driver seems to sense: soon as the weapon is ready to be fired, the car moves again. Forward. Disappears around the downhill curve of the cul-de-sac. It might be exiting the circle, turning right on Onondaga, and leaving the subdivision. But as Will watches, the headlights reemerge from the trees at the foot of the hill. The vehicle is coming back. He goes downstairs. Eight steps, short hallway, front door. He enters the unlock code. Then transfers the gun to his dominant hand. Opens the door a crack. What if it’s him, or the brother. Slowing, same as before. But also turning. The front wheels roll onto the driveway. Stopping. Passenger door opens and someone gets out and removes something from the backseat, though it’s hard to tell what. The trespasser comes onto the lawn and into the weak light. A few yards, a few more. Then Will unlatches the screen door and pushes on it, and says: “Put that down. Put it down and don’t run. If you run, I will shoot you in the back.” And the man pu
ts it down. A large pot with a handle on the top, a pressure cooker. He sets it on the ground and then he runs. Thinking perhaps that you won’t shoot. That you’ll still be standing near the bomb when he reaches the car and the driver sets it off with an electrical charge from a wireless device. But he is not going to reach the car. Drop him. A single shot between the shoulder blades. Before he hits the ground, fire again at the windshield. Fragments of glass ring over the hood. The car freezes. Then all of a sudden moves. Lurches forward, halts, leaps backward. Empty the clip—and though the driver by now is more or less dead, a reflexive depression of the accelerator will carry the vehicle in reverse across the road and onto the neighboring lawn, at which point even involuntary movement will end, the foot slipping off the pedal and the car slowing, coasting like a thing falling asleep, drifting into a peaceful rear-end collision with a birch tree, directly under the bedroom window of Dorian Wakefield.
11
The life of the Great Eastern Brood is once again coming to an end—as it has every seventeenth summer since the ice went from the land and a habitat of deciduous forest, a hundred million acres strong, grew up for them to sing in. In school, back in May, the three fifth grades had done a joint project: AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH THE EYES OF MAGICICADA SEPTENDECIM. 2021. 2004. 1987. And so on through the centuries. Back to 1630, a decade after the arrival of the Mayflower. The question of the assignment was: How much does a world change in seventeen years? What Dorian and his friends discovered is that a world can change an awful lot. For example, the cicadas had completely missed the Second World War. The pupae had been underground, blindly feeding on tree roots, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and were still five years from emerging when America, in 1948, after a long and bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland, finally dropped the atomic bomb on Tokyo. The insects had missed the Civil War, too. When the Brood of 1851 died out, Plaxico’s great-uncle’s grandfather had been the property of a white plantation owner in the Mississippi Territory; by the time the next generation came to light, he was a freedman.