“Because I’m being thorough.”
“Thorough is good, but so is efficiency. Are you aware of what’s going on overseas?”
“I am.”
“You could say the world is in a state of disarray. You could say there are many threats looming. But that would be an understatement. Everything we know about biology, geology, chemistry, and physics has changed. We are not only in the middle of a geopolitical crisis—we are in the middle of an existential quandary. Certain laws have been disrupted. We don’t know what it means to be human on this planet anymore. So you can understand why we’re so interested in . . . this thing. Why he exists and what he is capable of. Because there might be more of him. Or we—or somebody else—might be able to create more of him. We need to know his limits. We need to value him as a tool that might be used for or against us.”
“I understand my job.”
“But do you understand that what happens in this laboratory affects all of America? Your country needs to come first. What if a similar experiment is currently under way in China or North Korea or Russia or Iran? Imagine what happens if we lag behind them. Imagine how every freedom you and your fellow countrymen take for granted could be stolen away.” He knocks on the tabletop. “Just like that.”
“Yes. I think that’s enough of a lecture, thank you.”
“Mmm.” His eyes then settle on the book. “What’s that?”
“Nothing. I just —”
“Let me see.” He holds out his hand, and when she doesn’t give the book to him immediately, he rasps his finger and thumb together. Not quite a snap.
She does not give him the book but turns the cover toward him. “Ah, yes,” he says. “Hatchet.” He stares off into some middle distance as if remembering, then reaches over and clicks off the comm, removing the boy from their conversation.
“Is something wrong?” she says. “I thought it would be nice for him if I ended every day by reading him a chapter.”
“Oh, I’m sure it would be nice. Who among us doesn’t love to be read to?”
“It’s about a boy his age.”
“It is indeed. And if he were a normal child—going to a normal school, living a normal life—this would be a perfect selection. It’s very thoughtful of you. But I’m afraid I can’t allow it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A boy is lost in the woods, cut off from civilization. Despite his depressing circumstances, he learns self-reliance and confidence. He struggles with the memory of his disappointing parents. He has a weapon, one weapon, that helps him survive.” Gunn clears his throat. “Do you see? How dangerous something like this could be?”
“No, I actually —”
“This is not a classroom, Dr. Lennon. It is a laboratory. And that is not a boy. That is not even categorically a human. He—or it, if you will; I’m perfectly okay with the term it myself. It . . . is an alien. Or a weapon. A thing that could change the world. Reminding it of its humanity, encouraging its self-actualization, will only get in the way of what you were hired to do.”
Victoria looks at Hawkin, beyond the barrier. He can’t hear them, but he is watching intently. “I disagree. We’re killing him —”
“No, no, no. That’s exactly what we’re not doing. Day after day, he refuses to die. To even bleed.”
“His spirit, I mean.”
Gunn takes off his glasses. The stems have left angry red lines on the sides of his head. He cleans the lenses with a handkerchief, then fits them back into place. All of this takes a long time. He rises from the chair and picks up the book.
“Please,” she says.
He turns to the first page. And tears it out. And lets it flutter to the floor. Then does the same to the next page. Then the next after that. He studies her this whole time and she shakes her head in disgust. “I don’t understand you,” she says.
It is then that he grips both covers and, with a little effort, rips the book in half. Right down the spine.
The boy rushes to the barrier and begins banging on it with his fists. They can’t hear him, and they don’t need to, because his mouth is clearly spitting out No and I hate you!
Gunn says, “There’s an important moment in Hatchet, if I remember it correctly. Soon after the plane crashes, the boy tries to find something to sustain him. He eats some berries. And they’re the wrong berries.” He pushes open the door and says as he exits the room, “I’d like you to widen your data pool. And begin administering—in steady but organized intervals—poison. We’ll follow that up with electricity, explosives, radiation, extreme temperature differentials.” Just before the door closes behind him, he says, “We’ll discover the chink in his armor yet.”
14
* * *
John’s father is rarely without a jacket and never without a collar. He prefers khakis to jeans. He eats salad for breakfast. He avoids beer, opting for wine or scotch instead. He hates cable news but scans the New York Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal every day. He keeps a bowl of cashews nearby, and when he’s thinking hard about something, he scoops several into his big hand and delivers them to his mouth one by one while staring out the window.
His name is on the high-school football stadium. His name is on the hospital. His name is on the library. His name is on the food pantry and the women’s shelter and the addiction clinic. The forty-foot Paul Bunyan statue in the center of the town square, made out of steel and commissioned from a metalworker in Brainerd, has his name on it too. He is hated by the environmentalists and by the summer residents from the Twin Cities with second homes in the area but beloved by the working class, who see mining as their legacy and Frontier as their champion.
He doesn’t look or act like a northern Minnesotan, but a faint accent rounds out his vowels and he says supper instead of dinner. He doesn’t ice-fish, but he eats lutefisk. He doesn’t own a buffalo-plaid shirt, but his business satchel comes from Frost River in Duluth. He doesn’t snowmobile, but he pays for the maintenance of over three hundred miles of trails and the warming stations along them. His family immigrated here from Norway in the late 1800s, and they chose to stay. He chose to stay. That’s what people always say about Ragnar. He could have lived anywhere, but he chose to stay.
When John thinks of his childhood, his memories of his father are always crowded with other people. The man was so rarely alone. Money has its own gravity, and people orbited him, extending their hands for a shake, offering pens and contracts. John has a clear memory—or maybe it’s more than one—of his father winking at him before closing the door to his office. He can’t remember a single time the old man said I love you.
But there are a few moments between just the two of them that stand out in his mind. On the shore of Lake Superior, outside Grand Marais, his father held an agate the color of honey and told John to study it closely, to remember it, then he tossed it into the water and said, “Now go find it, Johnny. Show me how well you can swim.”
There was the time, a few days after his mother’s funeral, they went out for ice cream. When John said, “I’ll take a quadruple scoop in a waffle cone,” his father looked at him questioningly and then said, “What the hell. Make it two.”
And then there was the time his father sat him down on his bed and stared at him long and hard and then slapped him across the face and said, “This family has a name to uphold. What you do impacts all of us.” John was only fourteen at the time, but he’d snuck off one night and shot up every window in the downtown with his air rifle and when his father asked him why, he didn’t really have a good reason he could articulate. Since his mom died, he had gone from being a sweet, smiling, energetic boy to a nuisance, a jerk, a devil, a terrorist, the kid no teacher wanted in the classroom and no kid wanted to invite to his birthday party but had to anyway, because of John’s last name.
It was soon after this his father enrolled him at the boarding school for troubled boys that was more of a boot camp or a priso
n than a school. Stone Mountain Leadership Academy had a gated entry with a guard and a high barbed-wire-topped fence that surrounded the grounds. Seven days a week, the students attended classes, a church service, and a therapy circle, then went for a long, oxygen-starved trail run in the Rockies. John came home for holidays and summers. The school was supposed to make him better but maybe it made him worse. He hated Stone Mountain. He hated his family. He hated himself. He loved Jenna and the way she made him feel cared for, maybe a little like his mother had, but even she couldn’t keep him out of trouble. By the time he was eighteen he had consumed too much of every chemical cocktail imaginable, trashed three cars, and been arrested half a dozen times for everything from driving under the influence to assault to possession to illegal gambling. He was bailed out and represented in court every time by Yesno. “I’m trying to help, but I’m obviously not doing a very good job,” his father once said. “If you’d only try a little harder, I have no doubt you might become a great man. What can I do to make that happen?”
John said, “It’s okay to give up on me, Pops.”
Talia was always the perfect student and a dominant athlete, but really, she behaved even worse than John. She was just better at hiding herself from others. “You’re an agent of chaos,” she once told him. “If you’re going to do something wrong, do it for the right reason.” After John graduated from Stone Mountain, she took it upon herself to be more than his sister—she became his boss. At this point she was clearly in line to inherit the family business and she saw John as a sharp, dangerous tool that simply needed to be honed and wielded carefully.
Now look at him. That’s what everyone keeps saying. Look at him now. With his uniform. And his medals. Tidy haircut. Nice posture. Steady gaze. A hero. A good son. A Frontier. “I guess you can come home again,” more than one person had said to him at the wedding, and he had said, “For a little while anyway.”
Now look at Nico. Once the sensitive, bookish nerd who wrote poetry and listened to Dylan and had a thing for cats, he’s become an addict in some star-worshipping cult.
Now look at their father, the epitome of strength and class and honor and intelligence and success. He lies in a hospital bed, his hair burned off except in patches, his skin an angry red and stormy purple, mopped in ointment and mummied in gauze. Only some of his face is visible, and it looks as if it’s collapsing in on itself, like a town built over a mine, whole neighborhoods disappearing overnight.
Yesno woke up coughing around three a.m. He punched 911 into his cell before he had even climbed out of bed and opened the door and invited the black, poisonous cloud of smoke into his room. He crashed into walls, his eyes burning, then crawled, feeling his way forward with his hands. He discovered Ragnar unconscious in his office, buried beneath a messy pile of burning timbers. Embers snowed down on them when Yesno dragged him from the room. The emergency workers arrived soon afterward. Yesno was taken to the hospital, treated for second-degree burns and smoke inhalation, kept overnight for observation, then discharged, but Ragnar is in serious condition. He has second- and third-degree burns over 50 percent of his body. He still wears his omnimetal ring because they didn’t have a tool strong enough to cut it off, and it has fused with the flesh of his finger. He also has a skull fracture, maybe from the fallen ceiling. Hopefully his father can explain what happened when he wakes up. If he wakes up.
It’s possible, John knows, that his father is already gone. That his body is no more than a ruined husk. The same can be said of the house. The firefighters had been able to extinguish the blaze before it spread beyond the twentieth-century wing, but that was what John identified as his home: His father’s office. His old bedroom. His mother’s den. The photos of them all on the walls, locked away in their frames. The original architecture. All gone, a blackened cavity.
His father has been in a medically induced coma for two days, and since then John has stayed by his side, sleeping in a cot, watching westerns on television, and staring out the window at the traffic rolling in and out of town. He’s there because he wants to be and because he has to be. “I’ll be back soon,” Talia said over the phone. “But in the meantime, you stand guard. Whoever did this might try to finish the job.”
“Maybe it was just an accident.”
“Maybe my ass is a peach. Are you really that stupid? Someone did this.”
He doesn’t take his father’s hand, because it’s mittened in bandages, but he massages his feet softly, the only parts of him unburned. And every now and then he whispers in his ear. “I’m here, Pops,” he says, and “You don’t worry about anything. We’re going to take care of you. And we’re going to take care of the business. Me and Talia. Just like you wanted. Okay?”
His father’s breath is a wounded rasp. The heart monitor bleeps out a slow, steady rhythm. The room stinks of Betadine and flowers. There were so many arrangements sent to the hospital that the floor is yellow with pollen and John has started turning them away. Last night the nurse came in and told John there was a candlelight prayer service going on outside, and when he lifted the blinds, the parking lot looked like a galaxy of trembling stars. “Your father has a lot of people who love him,” she said, and John said, “He also has a lot of people who really, really hate his guts.”
Now John knocks out fifty pushups and a hundred jumping jacks and paces the room swinging his arms. He turns on the TV, sees that the news is reporting his father’s hospitalization, and turns it off again. He reads a few greeting cards pinned to the flower arrangements. Then he leans in to his father and whispers, “I’ll be right back.” The heart monitor spikes and falls and his father’s eyes roam restlessly beneath their closed lids.
John goes into the hall. An orderly rattles by with a laundry cart. A doctor with squeaky sneakers jots down some notes on a chart. The fluorescent lights buzz and cast their painful light. On his way past the nurses’ station he says, “Going to grab a coffee,” and when the woman in the powder-blue top barely glances up from her computer, he says, “Hey,” and knuckles the counter.
She stops typing and rolls back her chair and raises her eyebrows in annoyance. “Excuse me?”
“I need a coffee,” he says. “Can you keep an eye on the old man?”
She has long pink nails with rhinestones crusted on them. “We’re monitoring his vitals. Any trouble, we’ll know.”
“I mean make sure no one goes in there.”
“The police would have assigned an officer if they thought your father was in danger.”
“They tried. I sent them away.”
“Now, why would you go and do that?”
He almost tells her that he doesn’t trust the cops, but instead he says, “Please. I’ll be five minutes.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Boss Man,” she says and returns to typing, her nails clacking and scraping the keys. “Because I’m not busy at all.”
He heads to the lounge and feeds a dollar into the machine and selects the double—no, triple—espresso. The machine grinds the beans and the noise is such that he doesn’t hear the woman coming up beside him until she says, “Hi there.”
He startles. Then nods hello. She has the short, compact body of a gymnast. Her blond hair is in a ponytail so tight, it seems to stretch her face, to pull her mouth into a smile. She digs into her purse now and pulls out a sleeve of Starbursts. “Would you like some candy?”
“Um,” he says, “no. Thanks.” The coffee machine spits and hisses its brown sludge into a paper cup.
She puts the Starbursts back in her purse and clips it shut and says, “I wish I liked coffee. It seems like it’s what you’re supposed to drink. But it tastes muddy. And anyway, even a Diet Coke is enough to make my heart go pitter-patter.” She wafts her hand quickly toward her chest as if to extinguish a flame.
“I’m sorry,” he says and collects the cup. “Do I know you?”
“Not really, no,” she says. “I mean, we went to the same school for a while. Not the same class—I’m younger than you�
��but we were both at Portage Elementary and then the middle school and then —”
“Then I got shipped off to boarding school.”
She introduces herself as Stacie—Stacie Toal—and he says it’s nice to meet her and she says, “You look so different now.”
“Yeah?”
“No more long hair. No more —”
“There’s a lot of no mores.” He shakes a packet of sugar into the cup. “I decided it was time to stop being an asshole.” He runs a thumb along his birthmark. “But some things never change.”
“I heard about your father.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m super-sorry.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“I hope I’m not bothering you, but do you mind if we talk?”
“We’re talking now, aren’t we?” he says and sips from his coffee. “Wait. You’re not a reporter, are you?”
“No.” She digs into her purse again and he wonders if she’s going to offer him more candy, but instead she pulls out a badge. “I’m not a reporter.”
“Oh, whoa,” he says and takes a few steps back.
“Is something wrong?”
“You just look —”
When she says, “Like I’m fifteen?,” her smile widens, but it has a sharp curve to it. “So I’ve heard. Do you want to be by your dad when we talk? Otherwise there’s some comfy-cozy chairs over by the windows.”
“I need to be by my father.”
* * *
Stacie hopes John can’t tell how nervous she is. Only minutes ago, she threw up in the bathroom downstairs. She can feel her pulse behind her eyes. One of her fists is tightened so fiercely that her nails are digging painfully into her skin. But she suspects the Northfall police department isn’t following the rules. Stomping her foot and crying No fair! won’t help her accomplish anything. So she will meet them on their terms.
The Ninth Metal Page 10