The Alex Crow

  Most of the town we came to lay in rubble that piled into the roadway leading away into the mountains. The convoy stopped in the center of the road, adjacent to a square that would have been a marketplace on any normal day that didn’t involve aerial bombardment. All the soldiers climbed out of the vehicles, rifles pointed and ready to fire at anyone who might be there, but nobody moved on the street at all.

  I waited and watched from the bed of the truck. The soldiers didn’t pay attention to me in the silence of the aftermath to the small city’s destruction. Eventually, stiff and sweaty from confining myself to the cramped corner of the truck bed, I climbed down into the market square.

  There were some bodies. I had learned to not look at them; it was almost a power we had gained that allowed us to make corpses vanish into invisibility.

  The men scavenged through the marketplace, looking for anything worth taking.

  I saw a gate that was built across the road beyond the last broken buildings in the city. It was an odd thing to me; a simple wooden bar that could be lifted in order to allow one to pass between here and there, because if you just stepped off the road and into the dirt, you could walk around the gate as though it didn’t exist at all.

  Gates make eloquent arguments that condition our choices.

  Next to the gate was a small office. The roof of the office had been burned away. Smoke rose from its blackened insides.

  And there was a man and woman, walking down the road, pulling a wagon toward the crossing. The woman carried an infant. Nobody said anything to me when I walked away from the convoy and followed the people with the wagon. It was as though I had vanished, too.

  The man and woman did not look back toward us. They knew that looking at the soldiers was the wrong thing to do, but they must have been fully aware that we had arrived in the square. The trucks were so noisy.

  I stepped past a flattened stall. Lying against the edge of a splintered plywood wallboard was an unopened bottle of drinking water. I picked it up. It was a miracle.

  It may have been an accident, too, but in any event the water meant I was going to be alive to drink it, and that was something worth holding on to.

  And in the act of stooping to grab the bottle of water, I realized there was a dead boy, lying faceup, his curled fingers just inches from my own hand. It was almost as though the boy had passed the bottle of water directly to me, as both his final act on earth and his first act in whatever new place he had gone to.

  I made the mistake of looking at the dead boy’s face. Maybe it wasn’t a mistake; maybe it was an act that somehow I had been directed to do, and so was helpless. Maybe that’s the essence of a true miracle. Who can say?

  The dead boy wore a red scarf on his head. I recognized him. He was Jean-Pierre, the boy who’d pissed himself in the schoolroom on the afternoon of my fourteenth birthday.

  “Thank you for the water, Jean-Pierre.”

  Here was another story shelved in Ariel’s library.

  Then I covered my schoolmate with a broken piece of plywood and walked away, following the couple and their wagon, carrying my unopened bottle of water.

  “Hey! Little boy! Ariel!”

  I turned around and looked back at the soldiers in the market. Thaddeus stood in the rubble of the roadway, his rifle slung diagonally across his thighs.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he shouted.

  I pointed at the gate. The wagon-pullers had nearly reached it.

  “Over there,” I said.

  Thaddeus frowned and shook his head. “Don’t go.”

  “You said I wasn’t a prisoner, remember?”

  “Well, suit yourself, little boy. Suit yourself.”

  Thaddeus spit on the ground.

  I turned toward the gate and started walking. The man and woman were somehow determined to raise the gate and remain on the road with their wagon. I thought it was a strange thing to want to do, but who am I to say?

  They were having trouble managing the gate. The woman held on to her baby, and the man held on to his wagon.

  “I can help you through.” I waved my bottle of water at them and hurried to help.

  “Wait! Little boy! Stop!”

  When I turned back, I saw that Thaddeus was aiming his rifle at me.

  He said, “I don’t want you to leave.”

  What could I do?

  Of course I was scared. My hand began to sweat and I felt the water bottle slipping from my grasp.

  Max, I believed Thaddeus intended to kill me on that road leading out of the town.

  So I told him this: “I can’t make up for what you did when you were a boy. I promise I will not tell anyone about your dog.”

  Thaddeus lowered his rifle. It was another miracle.

  Then I ran and held up the gate so the small family could pass through.

  On the other side, the man looked at me suspiciously and said, “What are you supposed to be?”

  “A clown,” I said.

  “I’ve never seen you before. I would have seen you if you came from here. Where did you come from?”

  “A refrigerator,” I said.

  MALE EXTINCTION

  In addition to her duties attending to the psychological afflictions of the boys at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Martha Nussbaum also worked for Alex Division.

  I have heard people in America use the expression “It’s a small world” about such correlations. But, actually, I’m fairly certain the world is somewhat larger and heavier than it ever was in the past. In truth, the world is not small, it’s just that Merrie-Seymour Research Group and Alex Division permanently encompassed every component of my and Max’s lives. The same was true for Cobie Petersen, whose father was chief of security at Alex Division’s main facility. Cobie Petersen admitted this to Max when the boys were attempting to figure out why we’d been sent here in the first place.

  We eventually came to conclude that we were less our parents’ sons than their subjects.

  None of us—Max, Cobie, or myself—truly belonged at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. And the research Mrs. Nussbaum had been conducting on boys for all these years turned out to have chilling implications.

  Although the specific focus of Mrs. Nussbaum’s scientific research was unclear to just about everyone at Alex Division, which was how the company routinely operated, I found out that she had published a controversial nonfiction text the same year that Max and I were remanded to her care at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

  The title of Mrs. Nussbaum’s book was Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species.

  Max, a practiced thief, found a copy of the book in Larry’s cabinet the night he stole the key to the counselors’ private clubhouse and asked me and Cobie Petersen if we wanted to break in with him. Of course we did. Max theorized there might be a television or a computer in there, and hoped he’d be able to watch cartoons or look at porn and chat with his friends back in Sunday.

  There were neither of those conveniences, as it turned out.

  But we all saw the book. Mrs. Nussbaum had apparently signed copies for each of the counselors at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. I don’t think any of them had so much as cracked theirs open. All the copies appeared to have been buried beneath the personal effects of the six counselors, which turned out to be equally as fascinating as Mrs. Nussbaum’s book about eliminating males.

  At first, Max told us the book must have been what he called all-girl porn, which excited Cobie Petersen. And we would never have figured out that Mrs. Nussbaum had written it, either, if not for the very unflattering author photo on the back of the dust jacket. On the cover, the author had been listed as M. K. Nussbaum, MD, PhD.

  Cobie Petersen and Max were disappointed. The book turned out not to be porn. Max flipped through it and said it sucked if it was porn, because there was nothing but
a bunch of words in it.

  But what words they were. Mrs. Nussbaum actually endorsed the idea of eliminating all males from the human species.

  I can imagine Alex Division and Merrie-Seymour Research Group as being something like a monster with multiple heads—a Demikhov dog where each toothy mouth competes and pulls in opposition against the others. Because on the one hand there were people like Jake Burgess, so convinced of their command over everything that they could resurrect whatever they wanted to from the dark depths of extinction, while on the other, there were people like Mrs. Nussbaum who apparently were bent on hastening the inevitable end of mankind—malekind—and never allowing for an encore appearance.

  It was almost as though Alex Division were divided into warring fiefdoms.

  We stole a copy of Mrs. Nussbaum’s book, Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species, on Thursday night during our second week at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. Our sock puppet performance had been that afternoon, and that was the night Max took Larry’s clubhouse key.

  It was Trent Mendibles’s turn to listen for the sleepwalker’s alarm can. Even if he knew what we were going to do—and Trent Mendibles did not—he’d have to stay on duty in case Robin Sexton ended up dead, which would make Larry mad at us again. The three of us snuck out of Jupiter at two o’clock in the morning and left the guy with the hairiest legs any of us had ever seen in charge of the twitching, earplugged, ninety-four-pound sleepwalker from Pennsylvania.

  My brother Max stole the key to the counselors’ exclusive clubhouse right out of the pocket of Larry’s jeans, which Larry always folded and stored beneath his bed every night while he slept in his non-plastic bed wearing a T-shirt and pair of flannel pajama pants with Spider-Man on them.

  The other counselors had to have been smarter than Larry when it came to such matters as security, but then again, possibly not, since the other cabins were filled with relatively uninventive boys.

  And Larry slept soundly that night.

  Larry snored, too—very loudly.

  Max had said that he wished he’d stolen one of Dad’s snore wall gadgets, but he might feel bad about all the planes he’d bring down by turning it on. Still—and I could fully understand what inspired our father to invent the snore wall in the first place—there is almost nothing worse than sharing the same sleeping space with someone who snored like Larry or our mother did.

  So what’s a few plane crashes in the name of a good night’s sleep?

  We’d gone over our plan at dinner, and when we were certain everyone else at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys was asleep, the three of us slid out of our beds as quietly as we could manage.

  We got dressed.

  Max belly-crawled across the floor and slithered beneath Larry’s bunk to snatch the key. The three of us went barefoot, too, because Jupiter’s floor was made from squeaky pine planks. It was exciting and terrifying at the same time, and, at dinner, when Cobie expressed his concern about getting into trouble, Max argued, “So what if we get caught? What are they going to do to us, anyway? Kick us out?”

  Max definitely made a good case for not worrying about consequences.

  Cobie Petersen and I, barefoot, at two in the morning, followed Max across the grounds of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys and quietly slipped inside the counselors’ private locker room.

  Compared to the cabins and spider-infested showers and toilets in the rest of the camp, which served as the only yardstick by which we could measure the aesthetics of the counselors’ clubhouse, we had just stolen our way into a gilded palace.

  Max turned on the light.

  “Don’t turn that on!” Cobie Petersen whisper-hissed.

  “Why not?” Max said.

  “What if someone notices the light?”

  “Then they’ll probably think one of the counselors is in here taking a dump or maybe doing a little midnight woodworking.”

  “You think about jerking off too much,” Cobie said.

  “Dude. Don’t lie. I think about it as much as you do; I just maybe talk about it more.”

  Cobie Petersen considered Max’s point, nodded, and said, “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

  The inside of the clubhouse was as clean as a hospital operating room. The floors were tessellations of gleaming tile, and the walls paneled in cedar. In the center of the floor was a long bench that faced a row of nine tall lockers—each one decorated with the name and picture of the planet the counselor came from. To be fair, they weren’t actually lockers, they were more like personalized cabinets since none of them was actually locked.

  I jumped slightly when I heard the sound of splashing water. Max had turned on one of the showers.

  “What are you doing? You aren’t actually going to take a shower, are you?” Cobie asked.

  “No,” Max said. “Just checking. These fuckers have hot water.”

  And the showers were very nice. There were three of them at one end of the locker room, all separately enclosed in tile with curtains on the doorways—not like the concrete-floored open-room prison setup we were forced to use. And there were urinals with privacy panels between them, and toilet stalls with doors—again, the complete opposite to the barbaric row of open toilets in the boys’ bathroom.

  Max turned off the water and dried his hand on one of the fresh towels that sat atop a stack of perfectly white folded terrycloth, each of which had been embroidered in blue script with Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

  “Look at this shit,” Cobie said.

  That’s when he opened Larry’s cabinet of wonders.

  One thing was certain: Larry kept his things neatly organized. Inside his cabinet was a drawer containing toiletries—shaving supplies, deodorant sticks, toothpaste, and nail clippers—and a shelf on which were stacks of clean and folded T-shirts, socks, and underwear. Cobie and Max went through it all. They found Larry’s cell phone, too, but they couldn’t do anything with it because Larry had a security code programmed into it.

  “Well, he’s not as stupid as I thought,” Max determined.

  But the screen on his phone showed that he’d received two missed calls from someone named Lenny.

  Cobie Petersen reached inside Larry’s cabinet and pulled out his entire stack of boxer shorts.

  “What are you doing?” Max said.

  “Guys always hide stuff behind their underwear, dude. That’s where I hide shit in my house. Nobody wants to poke around there,” Cobie said. Then he turned to me with the armload of Larry’s underwear and said, “Here. Hold these.”

  I shook my head. There was no way I was going to hold a stack of Larry’s underwear just so Cobie Petersen and my brother could snoop around in his stuff.

  “Dude. What is wrong with you?” Cobie was irritated. I thought it was because I didn’t want to hold Larry’s boxers for him, but I was wrong. Because Cobie continued, “Why the hell don’t you ever talk?”

  “Because he’s stupid,” Max said. “That’s why.”

  I swallowed and folded my arms across my chest.

  “I’m not stupid,” I said. “I just don’t say anything because why would I want to talk to someone who hates me as much as you do, Max?”

  At that, I had to shut up because I felt my voice crack, and I wasn’t about to let myself look like I was about to start crying in front of Cobie and Max.

  Cobie Petersen looked at Max and said, “The kid’s right. Why do you have to be so fucked to him all the time? I wish I had a brother my age to hang around with, instead of two little sisters.”

  “I never asked him to come here,” Max argued.

  I said, “Nobody asked me about it, either.”

  “Well, at least he’s talking to us,” Cobie Petersen said. “Because I was about to punch him. Now, here. Hold this shit.”

  And Cobie pressed the pile of Larry’s underwear into my chest, point
ed a scolding finger at Max, and added, “And you better lighten up on Ariel. You’re the only friends I have in this shithole, but I’m not above twisting your arm and making you hug it out with your brother right now.”

  I was impressed. Cobie Petersen pronounced my name correctly.

  “That isn’t going to happen,” Max said. “Ariel’s holding Larry’s boxers.”

  Cobie Petersen was not one to let a challenge go unattended. He grabbed the bundle of Larry’s underwear, which was by this time beginning to unfold itself, and said, “You really want to go there? Okay. Now. Hug your brother or I’ll kick the shit out of you, Max.”

  Many thoughts fired through my mind at that moment. First, I wondered at the complexity of Cobie Petersen’s orders to Max, which demanded an act of kindness under the threat of violence. I also considered that Cobie Petersen was in effect delivering what our mother and father had said they wanted to happen—that Max and I would somehow bond over our six weeks at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, even if the real purpose of the camp was something sinister and twisted, which to this day I still can’t say whether Jake and Natalie Burgess were aware of.

  Max’s eyes went from Cobie, down to the shiny tiled floor in the counselors’ locker room, and then he looked at me.

  I can’t say for certain what I saw in Max’s eyes. Maybe he was sorry. Maybe this was the first time anyone had ever forced Max to think beyond his distanced perspectives. And I thought, maybe what Max had been doing to me these months since I came to Sunday, West Virginia, had been nothing more than a test to determine some measure of my character. Everyone in my life always seemed to be watching, testing, exerting control over things that couldn’t be tamed; so what made Max any different?

  “Do it,” Cobie Petersen urged.

  That’s when my brother Max, barefoot, stepped around Cobie Petersen and stood in front of me, so close I could feel the heat rising like steam clouds from his nervous chest. Then he put his arms around me and hugged me tightly. I hugged him back, too.