The Alex Crow (22 page)

Everything Joseph Stalin told
the melting man was coming true, right before Leonard Fountain's eyes.

The Beaver King really
was
hiding out in a place near the Little America Mall, which Leonard Fountain had driven past on his way to Lake Moomaw—Lake Beaver Dam. And Poppa Bear himself affirmed to the melting man that the three bears also used to live where his younger brother Larry worked, Camp Merrie-Seymour for Beavers.

It was all working out, and the melting man's masterpiece would finally be put to good use.

“You are driving. You are driving,” 3-60 said.

And Crystal Lutz played her accordion and sang along with Igor Zelinsky:

He said to me, “Why don't you run?

I see you don't have any gun.”

Whereas the melting man had been weeping earlier, now he was very happy.

Joseph Stalin was happy, too.

He said, “You are finally going to amount to something, Leonard!”

“You sound like my father,” the melting man said. “I hate my father.”

“You are driving. You are driving. Oh, Lenny, you've lost another tooth!” 3-60 said.

It was true. One of the melting man's large molars had dislodged from the mushlike putty of Leonard Fountain's infected gums. The melting man nearly choked on it, and when he spit it out onto the dashboard, it left a black gooey smear of pus and blood.

Leonard Fountain—Igor Zelinsky—was exhausted.

Actually, Leonard Fountain wasn't merely exhausted, he was nearly dead. He only had one more thing he needed to do, then everybody would finally be satisfied with Leonard Fountain.

“You see the posts of the camp up ahead on the left,” 3-60 said. “It is getting closer. It is getting closer.”

The melting man's atomic U-Haul had finally arrived.

“You are parking on the side of the road,” 3-60 narrated.

And Leonard Fountain looked across the street at the electric metal gates that were swinging open—almost as though to invite him in—between the hewn log posts and the sign that read:

Camp Merrie-Seymour for Beavers

Where the Beaver King Has Been Hiding from You!

So this was it, Leonard Fountain thought.

This had to be it.

And as the gates to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Beavers swung open, a black Town Car pulled out and then paused before turning down Route 600.

Leonard Fountain noticed the license plate on the car as it rolled through the gate. It was a personalized plate that said
NUS
BOMB
. But Leonard Fountain was too far gone to actually read the plate. He didn't need to, because the only thing he could see was
BVR
KING
.

“That's him!” The melting man was so excited, he urinated bloody piss all over himself.

Martha Nussbaum was leaving Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys for the weekend before the fat kids came. In fact, Martha K. Nussbaum, MD, PhD, was leaving Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys and Alex Division of Merrie-Seymour Research Group for good. Her bags were packed, and she had a one-way, first-class ticket on Lufthansa.

“The Beaver King!” Joseph Stalin said.

The melting man spun the U-Haul van back out onto the highway and followed the Beaver King.

“Don't fuck this up!” Joseph Stalin said.

Leonard Fountain began to cry again. “I promise not to fuck this up, Dad.”

“You are crying. You are crying,” 3-60 said.

And Crystal Lutz played a song called “Warm Leatherette” on her accordion. She sang to Igor Zelinsky as he pursued the black Town Car down the road:

Quick—Let's make love. Before you die.

And in the air above the melting man's poisonous vehicle a small metal object hovered along, watching, watching.

Somewhere not terribly far away, sitting in separate offices at Merrie-Seymour Research Group's Alex Division facility, Colton Benjamin Petersen Sr., Jacob Burgess, and Harrison Knott were watching it all unfold; had been watching even as a lunatic from a botched droning experiment fired a pistol at their own sons.

“Pull the plug?” Colton Petersen asked.

“I think he's past the point,” Major Knott answered.

- - -

“You are melting. You are melting,” 3-60 said.

Leonard Fountain was liquefying behind the wheel of his festering U-Haul van.

“Activate the switch, Leonard! It is time!” Joseph Stalin commanded.

The timers ticked and ticked and ticked, and Crystal Lutz played wildly. The melting man forced the van up closer and closer to the tail of the black Town Car ahead of him.

“Oh, Lenny! Your phone is ringing again!” 3-60 said.

“Huh?”

It was all so much, inside and outside the melting man's head, all at once.

Leonard Fountain looked at his phone. His little brother was calling. He'd forgotten about visiting his little brother, like he said he was going to. There were more important things to do now.

“Don't answer the phone!” Joseph Stalin told him. “Activate the switch! It's time, Leonard! It's time!”

“You are driving. You are driving. You are answering the phone,” 3-60 narrated.

“Huh . . . Hello? Larry?” the melting man said.

“Hey, Lenny. You nearby? I thought you'd be here by now.”

“Something came up.”

“Get off the phone!” Joseph Stalin shouted.

The melting man steered with his knee and pressed the timers into his head.

Crystal Lutz played and sang.

Flying fish leapt up from the asphalt sea of Route 600. They flitted along beside Leonard Fountain's van. They smiled at him, and several splattered—
thunk! thunk! thunk!
—into the windshield.

The melting man was melting.

“Sorry, Larry. I gotta go.”

And it was on the John Lederer Bridge that the melting man lost sight of the Town Car, which was speeding on its way to Dulles Airport.

- - -

Here we see the melting man, a flawed biodrone from Merrie-Seymour Research Group, being decommissioned by remote control.

Here, kitty-kitty.

So much for the John Lederer Bridge.

So much for the melting man.

One step closer to male extinction.

Mrs. Nussbaum noticed a bright flare in her rearview mirror; it was like one of those annoying traffic-signal cameras firing machine-gun flashbulbs at an inattentive line-crosser.

One day, humanity won't need such devices, she thought.

On the way back to
Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys with Marshmallow Jeff, it was Max who concluded that we had come full circle: that the six weeks of hell here began with a kid getting shot through the foot and would most definitely come to an abrupt end with another being shot through the hand.

And Max said, “Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Where Boys Rediscover the Fun of Being Shooting Victims!”

So our six-week captivity at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys ended pretty much the way it began, with Larry being mad at us and calling us all a bunch of fuckheads.

The thing that made him especially angry, besides Cobie Petersen actually being shot, was that Mars won the final challenge.

Nobody liked the Martians.

To be honest, none of the planets in the Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys solar system liked one another at all.

And nobody got to spend the entire day Friday enjoying the freedom and consumerism of the Little America Mall due to the mysterious vaporization of the John Lederer Bridge, which was pretty much the only way to get from Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys to the Little America Mall and all its pretzel stands and sensory stimulation and so on.

And when the three of us did come back to Jupiter after dark, Trent Mendibles sprang up from his crumpling bed, fists balled, and ready to throw punches at Cobie, which he probably would have done if Cobie wasn't all covered in blood and pale.

“What in the name of fuck happened to you?” Larry demanded.

Cobie Petersen raised his hand.

“Got shot by an asshole in a U-Haul,” he said. “Do you have a brother, Larry? Because when we were out there, the fucker who shot at us said you were his brother.”

“Lenny?” Larry said, “You saw my brother Lenny?”

“Well, he didn't say his name, but he did look like you, except for all the sores and stuff on his face,” Cobie Petersen said. “And then he shot me.”

“And he was bat-fucking-shit crazy,” Max added.

Cobie Petersen stretched out on his bed. Larry, deflated, sat with his face in his hands, mumbling something about quitting this shithole job.

“Larry?” Cobie Petersen said, “Will you just promise to never call anyone else Teacher's Pet? It will always be special to me.”

“Or fuckhead, too,” Max added.

“Fuck you, guys,” Larry said. “Lenny had a head injury when he was a kid.”

My brother Max nodded knowingly. “Head injuries can answer a lot of questions that genetics are just too afraid to ask.”

- - -

After they loaded Cobie Petersen into the same ambulance that had transported the camp's first martyr, Bucky Littlejohn, carloads of alerted parents began showing up like funeral motorcades to take their supposedly reformed sons back home to safer realities that could be paused and rebooted.

- - -

Colton Benjamin Petersen Sr. and Jake and Natalie Burgess arrived at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys early Saturday morning. They rode up from Sunday in a carpool van that belonged to Alex Division.

They had obviously stopped at the hospital Cobie was taken to, because Cobie waved a white-gauze-wrapped hand at us from the third-row seat.

Colton Petersen stuck his hand out to us. “Ariel and Max! Very nice to meet you boys! You're quite a team! Quite a team!” Cobie's father said. At the time, I didn't think much of it. Max and I talked about it the next day, though—how strange it was that Mr. Petersen knew exactly who we were, and that we had been such a good team at the games, because we had never met any of the Petersens before Max and I came to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

And then I saw Major Knott standing beside the driver's door on the van, alone in the gravel parking area.

Even though he'd promised we would see each other often, this was the first time I'd seen Major Knott since arriving in Sunday. It was understandable. I told myself that he must have wanted me to adjust to my new family, and he was so busy, after all.

Still, just seeing him made me feel wonderfully happy—as though I'd been reunited with my real father after such a long time. I couldn't help myself; I ran over to him and hugged him. Then I felt bad because I hadn't so much as said hello to Mom and Dad before running off.

“Ariel! Look at you! You look splendid!” Major Knott said.

I felt my eyes getting a little wet, but I willed myself not to cry.

“How have you been?” I said.

“Well, I've missed playing chess with you,” Major Knott said.

“Me, too.”

“We'll have to set up a game, then. What do you say?”

“That would be good.”

We walked across the grass toward my parents. Natalie was limping. I found out later she'd been hit by a car crossing the street in Sunday, but she said it was nothing to worry about and that she'd be fine.

- - -

On the drive back to Sunday, I sat between Cobie Petersen and Max in the third row of the van.

“We smell really bad,” Max said.

Cobie Petersen agreed. “I noticed that.”

I nodded, too. These are things that happen to boys at camp.

I pointed at Cobie's bandaged hand.

“Is that going to be okay?” I asked.

He nodded. “I still have lefty to solve my math problems.”

Cobie reached over and put his arm around me and patted Max. He said, “I'm glad I met you gents. Made it all worth it.”

Then Max put his arm across my shoulders and hugged me and said, “It really wasn't so bad. It would have been worse if you weren't there.”

So I put my arms around Max and Cobie, but I didn't say anything.

And we did smell really bad.

Max asked me, “And when we get back, will you tell me all the stuff that happened to you before you came here?”

“You don't want to know that, Max.”

“Sure I do. If we're going to be brothers, then you should tell me. Only wait till after I take a shower. I want to put on some clean clothes that don't have my name written in them, and, dude, I really, really need to
propagate some of my lucky bamboo
.”

I laughed and shook my head. “You are so gross, Max.”

Here are all the stories
I shelved in your library.

I never thought you'd want to hear these things, Max.

And here's what I found out: The terrible stories are the same as the extinct beings that Dad brings back to life—each one pulls from the original, which never loses weight in the replication. So they all remain equal in substance for us to carry around—the boy in the clown suit, the men in the schoolroom, a refrigerator, the little dog, a coffee server named Ocean, the boys in the city of tents—populating and overpopulating, filling all the libraries inside every one of us.

The night we came home from Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, I told Max my entire story, which began on my fourteenth birthday in a field where my friends and I—we were such children then—found the skull of Mr. Barbar's ram.

Max and I sat alone in my room in the dark.

The stories went through the night, past midnight. Sometimes Max would ask a question—about what it was like traveling with the soldiers in wartime, if I was ever afraid, things like that—but he listened, even though at times the things I said made him uncomfortable.

When I finished, we sat in the dark not saying anything for I don't know how long. Then Max, his voice a little shaky, said, “I'm really sorry I was such a dick to you, Ariel.”

What could I say?

“It's okay, Max.”

“Do you want me to sleep in here? I mean, I'll sleep on the floor if you're afraid or anything.”

“It's okay. Really. You don't need to do that, and I'm not afraid. But thank you, Max.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I wanted to make it okay for Max, but I wasn't sure if there was anything I could do. These things happen.

- - -

On Sunday morning, while for the first time in six weeks I was asleep in a regular, non-plastic bed, Max came in and threw himself across my feet. He woke me up, took one of my pillows to prop up his head, and complained about how six weeks of getting up at dawn had ruined him for life, and did it do the same thing to me?

I told him I wasn't sure, and that he should come back later and ask me after I woke up.

But he stayed there, lying across my bed, and we talked about things. It was a morning like I had never had in all my previous lives, and it was very nice.

Max had left the door open, and Alex, our dead-and-alive pet crow, flapped his way in and landed on my windowsill. The bird pecked on the glass twice, then turned a beady eye at me and Max and said, “Kill me now. God! I really need to ditch some squids.”

“Do you teach him all that?” I asked.

“Not the suicidal stuff,” Max said. “I don't know where he gets
that
from.”

“The other, though.”

“Yeah. Pretty awesome, huh?”

“It's something. That's for sure,” I said. “
Ditch some squids
?”

“Kind of poetic, isn't it?” Max said.

“Ditch some squids,” Alex, our crow, echoed.

I really did not want to be talking to Max about this so early in the morning. Not ever, actually.

“And, anyway, don't tell me
you're
not totally relieved to finally be back home. Don't lie, Ariel. But I realized last night in the shower I was kind of out of practice after six weeks.”

“Really. You don't need to tell me what you do in the shower, Max.”

“Maybe everyone knows, anyway. Maybe it's like Cobie said—and we're all chipped, and we're just putting on one hell of a show for everyone at Alex.”

“I wish you wouldn't say things like that, either,” I said.

And Alex, our crow, hearing his name, bobbed his sad little head up and down and said, “Round up the buffaloes! Round up the buffaloes!”

I put my arm over my eyes and sighed.

“This house is insane,” I said.

“You love it, though,” Max said. “But I have been thinking about what Cobie said. And Mrs. Nussbaum, too. Because what if they actually
did
do it to one of us? Or all of us? They would do it, don't you think? They're just crazy enough, between Mrs. Nussbaum wanting to oversee the extinction of all males, and Dad wanting to oversee the resurrection of anything he can save. And who even knows about what kinds of things Cobie's dad or Major Knott are after?”

I didn't say anything. I wished I was still asleep. But Max turned onto his side and grabbed one of my feet and continued, “Don't you think it was weird how Mr. Petersen knew exactly who we were? And that we were
such a good team
?”

“Of course he'd know who we are, Max. Maybe Dad showed him pictures.”

“Of you? There aren't any.”

“Well, you. You plus one equals I have to be Ariel, right? The team thing was just a coincidence,” I said. “Anyone would have said that.”

“Anyone? Okay. But Mr. Petersen did ask Dad one thing about you. When you were over by the van hugging Major Knott.”

I felt myself reddening, thinking about how everyone had been watching me and Major Knott.

“He asked Dad if you ever had another episode after the one on the airplane.” Max shook my foot again and said, “What's an
episode
?”

The niceness of the morning, of being there in my own bedroom and talking to my brother, suddenly turned to ice.

Of course I knew what it all meant, even if I didn't say anything to Max about it. They had been using me; I was another surveillance drone, maybe something worse, not quite a person, I suppose; not quite a crow.

- - -

I took Max's bicycle and rode over to Major Knott's house that morning before Jake and Natalie got out of bed. Or maybe they weren't even home; who could say?

Max wanted to come with me, but I talked him out of it because there was only one bicycle, and I told him I needed to talk to Major Knott alone. I didn't know how to get to Major Knott's house, though, so Max had to give me directions, which I wrote in black pen on the back of my left hand.

Also, I wasn't very good at riding Max's bike. I crashed turning the corner on Stoney Creek Road, which was the street Major Knott's house was on. I scraped my elbow pretty bad on the pavement and dripped a little trail of blood droplets up the road.

Max told me Major Knott's house was the second or third house on the right. He didn't know the house number, but he told me it was a one-story brick house with a white door, which pretty much described every house I saw on Stoney Creek Road.

Naturally, the first door I knocked on was not connected to Major Knott's house.

The woman who answered the door was a dark-skinned Asian lady, who was about four inches shorter than me. She was wearing a lacy pink nightgown that was nearly transparent and reached the tops of her feet. Her hair was rolled up in curlers of all different sizes and colors, and she had a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.

I was afraid of her. I knew right away I must have guessed the wrong house, and thought she would be mad at me, so I just stood there with my mouth open, dumbly staring at the lady.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“You're bleeding. What happened?”

“Oh. Uh. I crashed on my bike. Well, my brother's bike.”

The woman sucked on her cigarette and turned her chin so she wouldn't exhale the smoke on me. She blew it out her nose inside her house.

“Come in. I have something you can put on it.”

She swung the door wide.

“Oh. No, I wasn't looking for help. I was looking for a friend of mine. He lives on this street somewhere. His name is Harrison Knott.”

“The English guy?”

“Yes.”

“He's a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Well, come in. I still have something you can put on your arm. Unless you want to bleed on his porch, too.”

I looked down and noticed the little splotches of blood I'd deposited beside my foot on the painted concrete porch.

“I'm sorry.” I could feel myself turning red.

The woman sucked on the cigarette again.

“Don't be.”

The smoking woman took me into her kitchen, where she ran warm water over the scrapes on my arm. She washed off my wounds with her bare hands, all the while sucking on her cigarette and carefully blowing the smoke away from me. She turned the water off and said, “Stay there.”

What could I do?

I stayed there with my arm in her sink.

She grabbed a clean dish towel from a drawer and then patted my arm dry.

“Does that hurt?”

“No. Well, yes. A little.”

Then she wrapped the towel around my arm and led me over to her small dining room table.

“Sit down,” she said.

I sat down.

She disappeared into a hallway behind me. It was all so strange. I couldn't understand why the woman would so matter-of-factly take a kid into her house—a bleeding kid—and then try to help him without even hesitating or thinking about it.

When she came back, she had some antiseptic spray and two flesh-colored bandages, about the size of index cards. I thought about writing
Inside a refrigerator
on one of them before she stuck it on my arm.

“You're not from here, are you?” she said.

“From
here
?”

“Yeah. Here. West Virginia. America.”

“Oh. How can you tell?”

She exhaled smoke. “You have an accent. It's cute.”

“You're not from here, either,” I guessed.

“How can you tell?”

“The hair curlers?” I asked.

The woman laughed and smoothed the bandages over my scrapes.

“You shouldn't leave these on, but you don't want to bleed on the English guy's house. Take them off today so you can get air on that road rash.”

“Is that what it's called?”

“That's what kids here call it,” she said. “What do kids call it where you come from?”

“An accident.”

She took the cigarette out of her mouth and dropped it in an ashtray that looked like an orange abalone shell.

“The English guy lives in the next house that way.”

She pointed at her kitchen wall. There was a painting of two dolls hanging on it.

“Thank you,” I said.

“If he's your friend, how come you don't know where he lives?”

I showed her the writing on the back of my left hand.

“It's my brother's fault.” I said, “He gave me bad directions.”

- - -

Major Knott was having coffee on his porch and reading the Sunday newspaper when I rode up Stoney Creek Road and deposited Max's bicycle on the corner of his front lawn near the driveway.

If he was surprised to see me, he didn't show it. And if I was happy to see him—which I wasn't—it didn't show, either.

“Ariel! Good morning!”

I stood in the grass at the bottom of the steps leading up to the porch, not really sure of where to begin.

So I said, “What did you do to me?”

Major Knott's smile dissolved. He folded the newspaper and placed it on the table.

“Do you want to sit down?”

He pushed a chair out from the side of his small table.

I looked over my shoulder to where Max's bike lay in the yard. Major Knott's wife was in the garden, bent over a row of tomato bushes. She was young and pretty, just like I'd pictured the type of woman who'd be attracted to Major Knott. I almost had the feeling someone was watching us.

Someone was always watching us, I suppose.

I climbed the steps and sat down beside Major Knott, and said it again: “What did you do to me?”

Major Knott's tone was unapologetic. He turned his hands up and said, “I brought you to America.”

- - -

Inside his office, Major Knott said this to me: “Suppose you were flying in an airplane. Just you, the pilot, and someone you love, someone you care about very much. Do you have someone like that, Ariel?”

I thought about Max, but I didn't want to say anything to Major Knott about people I cared for. It was all a trick, an accident of my survival, anyway.

He continued: “And suddenly the pilot jumps out of the plane, so the two of you are left up there, alone in a plane with no pilot. What are you going to do? Crash, or learn to fly?”

I didn't answer him. Why should I? Did he think I was stupid, even after I'd figured out what he'd done to me?

“Someone has to fly the plane, Ariel. Someone has to keep us from crashing, because it's certainly going to happen if we don't. That's why we—your father and I, and the rest of us—do what we do. We have to figure out the controls.”

So that was it: controls. Extinction, de-extinction, drones and biodrones, a chipped boy rescued from a tent full of orphans, even
girl sperm
.

And he actually thought this was flying the plane.

I said, “Show me how it works. You know, what you did to me, the thing you put in my head when you took me to the dentist.”

“Sit down here.”

Major Knott wheeled his desk chair out for me, and I sat facing a computer monitor. He took out the little controller he'd used on the plane to make my headache stop and handed the device to me. When I looked at it closely, I saw my name—
ARIEL
JUDE
BURGESS
—printed along one side.

The thing actually looked like a touch-screen cell phone. He told me to press the home button and the panel lit up with an array of colored and numbered buttons.

“Touch that green one and watch the monitor,” he said.

What I saw looked like I was standing in a hall of mirrors: the computer screen inside a computer screen, inside another and another, infinitely. I was looking out my own eyes at an image of looking out my own eyes. Forever.

“The home button turns it off,” he said.

I turned
Ariel Jude Burgess
off.