The Alex Crow

  “So are you,” the melting man pointed out. “It’s hard to pee when Joseph Stalin and the Beaver King are watching me.”

  “Your clothes are ruined, and I am watching you pee, Lenny,” 3-60 told him.

  “Everyone needs to stop watching me pee,” the melting man said.

  It always made Leonard Fountain nostalgic when 3-60 called him Lenny. It reminded him of his little brother. He had tried to phone his brother twice the evening before, but there was no answer. The melting man had only a vague idea of where his brother might be; it had been years since the two had actually seen each other.

  “You need to find some new clothes, Lenny,” 3-60 said.

  The melting man’s zipper was so clogged with goo and filth, he couldn’t close his fly.

  “Your zipper’s down,” 3-60 pointed out.

  “I wish I could slap you both,” Joseph Stalin said.

  Leonard Fountain, his zipper hanging open, shut the cargo compartment of his van, climbed up into the cab, and drove into the town of Lafayette.

  Leonard Fountain decided to shop for a fresh change of clothes at the Lafayette First Church of Christ Charity Thrift Store. The thrift store had everything the melting man needed, even underwear. For just a moment, the melting man found himself wondering who would actually donate old underwear to a charitable organization, and what type of person would buy someone else’s used underwear? Even the melting man had standards, but despite this reluctance, he selected two pairs of boxers and three pairs of briefs, anyway, along with some socks. And on the top of the rack where the men’s underwear dangled from clothespinned hangers was an assortment of hats of all types.

  The melting man, who had lost nearly all his hair from the toxic mix of radiation and mercury in his van, thought a hat might be a good idea. He picked up a dark gray homburg and lifted it above his head.

  “Hey now! If you try on anything, you’re going to have to buy it!”

  Leonard Fountain didn’t realize a fat man wearing suspenders and long johns behind the counter was watching him.

  “Huh?” the melting man said.

  “You heard me. No trying on unless you buy it,” the man said.

  “You should kill him. He’s been watching you,” Joseph Stalin said.

  Leonard Fountain put down the homburg. “I left my gun in the van.”

  “That plaid stingy-brim would look good on you.”

  At first, the melting man imagined it was 3-60 who’d directed his attention to the plaid hat, but it was someone else. A woman stood on the opposite side of the rack of men’s underwear. She pointed out the hat for Leonard.

  Crystal Lutz worked at a sausage factory in Farmington Hills, Tennessee. Her typical eight-hour shift involved preventing traffic jams on the bratwurst line. She monitored quivering chunks of meat and fat as they marched along a metal conveyor belt and into a pulverizing machine.

  Leonard Fountain—the melting man—looked like sausage meat to Crystal Lutz.

  Of course, Crystal Lutz didn’t actually exist. The small, malfunctioning tissue-based machine Leonard Fountain had been paid one thousand dollars to have implanted behind his right eye had been scripting and broadcasting its own show for the past decade.

  “Huh?” the melting man said.

  “You are turning red and getting aroused because the pretty girl is talking to you, Lenny,” 3-60 told him.

  “Don’t try it on,” the man behind the counter said.

  “That one there.” Crystal Lutz pointed again. “I think it would look good on you. My name is Crystal.”

  “Um. Hi, Crystal,” Leonard Fountain said. He was sweating and melting, and insanely horny. And Crystal Lutz was exactly like Joseph Stalin and 3-60, except for one thing: The melting man could see her.

  “What’s your name?” Crystal Lutz asked.

  “Igor Zelinsky,” Joseph Stalin told him.

  “Igor Zelinsky,” Leonard Fountain said.

  Crystal Lutz smiled like she could eat Leonard Fountain on the spot, if she were real, and if she were a cannibal. “Igor’s a bitchin’ name.”

  “Say thank you, Lenny,” 3-60 instructed.

  “Thank you,” the melting man said.

  With Crystal Lutz accompanying him, Leonard Fountain purchased two pairs of pants, three button-up shirts, two pairs of boxer shorts, three briefs, and a plaid stingy-brim hat.

  “You drive around in this?” Crystal Lutz said when they got out to Leonard Fountain’s repurposed U-Haul van.

  “Yes.”

  “Bitchin’.”

  “Be polite, Lenny,” 3-60 reminded him.

  “Thank you,” the melting man said.

  “Don’t let her distract you from what you need to do, Leonard,” Joseph Stalin scolded.

  “You are climbing in the van with the pretty girl,” 3-60 narrated. “You are very aroused.”

  Leonard Fountain was quite possibly the most insane person on the planet.

  THE YOKE OF INAUSPICIOUS STARS

  Cobie Petersen raised his hand in his most earnest Teacher’s Pet fashion. He looked at his hand; then he looked at Max and me.

  “Who wants to get stoned?” he said.

  Max raised his hand. “I do.”

  I shook my head. “Not me.”

  The three of us sat, cross-legged on a clearing off the trail beside the cinder-block well house, listening to the splash of the spring water as it spilled from the overflow pipe.

  I held our stolen flashlight. I shined it onto the pages of section one from Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species. Cobie Petersen scooted along the ground and got so close to me his knee came to rest on top of mine.

  “I need some of that light,” he said. He dug around in his pocket and pulled out the pot and papers he’d taken from Larry’s cabinet. He crumbled the weed onto the lap of his beige shorts and began rolling it up in one of the papers.

  Staring down at his fingers in concentration, Cobie Petersen, who obviously had skill when it came to rolling marijuana cigarettes, said, “So, how’s the book?”

  “Oh. It’s scary, I guess,” I answered.

  “Scary? Mrs. Nussbaum? No way, dude.”

  Cobie bent forward and licked the adhesive edge on his rolling paper, and then started making a second joint. He grabbed his crotch and adjusted himself.

  “God! It’s been a long-ass time since I’ve gotten stoned,” he said. “It’s practically giving me a boner. What’s our therapist say in there?”

  “Well, I’m only in the first part, but it sounds like she really believes that the only way to save the human species from self-destruction is to get rid of all the males. At the World Conference on Male Declination in 2014, a universal charter was approved, stating that the male human was the principal driving mechanism behind our species’ extinction, which the conference’s panel of scientists estimated will occur sometime during the coming century. And there were even men scientists who participated in the study.”

  “That’s stupid,” Max said. “Without males, there wouldn’t be a species. Duh. Maybe Mrs. Nussbaum missed that week in junior high school sex class.”

  “She’s a doctor,” I offered.

  “That never excluded anyone from being fucking insane,” Cobie said.

  He probably had a point.

  “The book says that scientists have discovered a method to make viable, functioning sperm from female stem cells. Mrs. Nussbaum even claims that an American woman has actually given birth to two healthy daughters using female sperm.”

  “That’s the dumbest and grossest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Cobie Petersen said. “Girl sperm? Girls don’t have sperm.”

  “Female sperm?” Max asked. “That sounds totally gross.”

  Cobie Petersen nodded thoughtfully. “Dude. If you ask me, sperm is just
like farts. Everyone else’s is totally gross except for your own.”

  “I can see that,” Max said. “So I suppose Mrs. Nussbaum has a dick, or what?”

  I shook my head. “No. They created the female sperm in a lab.”

  “So Mrs. Nussbaum likes to unclog the ketchup bottle once in a while and thump out some girl sperm in her private laboratory? Can’t blame anyone for doing that on slow days at work. Unless it gets you fired, I guess,” Max said.

  “If she doesn’t have a dick, where’s her female sperm come out of, then?” Cobie Petersen asked.

  I sighed. It was so frustrating and embarrassing, talking about sex with Max and Cobie.

  “Yeah. That’s ridiculous,” Max agreed, “impossible. You need to have guys on the planet—guys with dicks—if you think anyone’s going to shake the yokes out of their inauspicious stars.”

  And I was impressed by Max’s ability to stretch a quote from Shakespeare into a statement on masturbation.

  “According to Mrs. Nussbaum, you don’t need guys anymore. Females can now make sperm,” I said.

  Cobie Petersen finished rolling a second pot cigarette.

  He reached across me with an open hand extended toward Max. “Dude. Let me have that lighter.”

  I continued reading, trying to ignore the spark of the flame and the smell of burning pot just inches from my face. Cobie Petersen sucked in a tremendous drag, held it, then exhaled billows of blue-gray smoke. He passed the joint across me to Max.

  Cobie Petersen said, “Ahhhh . . .”

  I thumbed ahead in Mrs. Nussbaum’s Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species. Apparently, the first section of the book was entirely devoted to the scientific studies that yielded the female sperm, failed attempts at fertilizing an ovum, and the successful development, just after the turn of our century, that produced two baby girls, born a year apart to the same mother.

  Mrs. Nussbaum hailed this era as “the final century of man.”

  Her dark prophecy was almost biblical in tone.

  The second section of the book was a rationale for the argument in support of programmed male extinction. Mrs. Nussbaum made a reasonable point, after all, considering the terrible things males had done in their never-ending effort to push our species toward the precipice of extinction, and control and manipulate everything they ever came in contact with. With viable and genetically diverse female sperm, she postulated, males could rapidly become extinct if females simply decided to refrain from breeding with them. Since female sperm can only create female offspring, male extinction would occur within fifty years. But the most frightening aspect of Mrs. Nussbaum’s case for facilitating the extinction of all male humans—she referred to it as “gender die-off”—was that her “Law of Male Uselessness” was primarily based on the results of comprehensive psychological and medical studies she had conducted over the course of the past decade on “a wide variety of males between the ages of twelve and seventeen years.”

  Wide variety?

  Merrie-Seymour Boys!

  We’re Merrie-Seymour Boys!

  We’re learning healthy habits,

  Smart as foxes, quick as rabbits!

  My brother Max erupted into a coughing fit beside me, which caused Cobie Petersen to laugh so hard he farted and fell backward in the dirt.

  And Cobie Petersen said, “I am so wasted, gents.”

  Max held the little yellow cigarette directly in front of my face and said, “Come on, Ariel. Loosen up and have a little fun for once in your fucked-up life.”

  I shook my head.

  “I have had fun before,” I said.

  “When?”

  I thought about it. I honestly didn’t have an answer for him. I remembered playing in Mr. Antonio’s field with Marden and Sahar on my fourteenth birthday, how I’d been dressed as Pierrot, and had white makeup on my face, and the times I’d played chess in the camp with Major Knott.

  “The sock puppet play this afternoon was pretty fun, I guess.”

  “You just sat there with your fingers sticking out,” Cobie Petersen said.

  “I moved them once in a while,” I argued.

  Then Max started laughing and pressed the end of the joint up to my mouth. His fingers felt wet against my lips, and the joint was soggy and smelled so strong.

  So I smoked with Cobie Petersen and Max Burgess, my American brother.

  What could I do? I realized how sad and lonely I’d been here in America, and I would do anything to keep my brother Max moving toward me.

  I inhaled.

  The smoke tickled like frayed straw broom whisks inside me, but I managed to hold it in and even to exhale without coughing.

  And Max said, “Welcome to America, little brother.”

  “You’re only sixteen days older than I am,” I pointed out.

  Cobie Petersen softly punched me on my shoulder.

  “I bet you’ve seen some messed-up shit,” Cobie Petersen said.

  I thought about a time I’d spent with other orphan boys in a camp of tents. I thought about all the stories I’d been carrying with me.

  “I’ve seen worse things than I can ever say.”

  Max looked at me. There was something in his eyes. I could see it hurt him in some way to think about the reality of where I’d come from, and what was behind me. “Really?”

  I didn’t want to picture that time, but what could I do? I needed to change the subject, pick a different story from my library. So I nodded. “One time, I spent two days hiding inside a refrigerator.”

  “That must have been cold,” Cobie said.

  “It was broken. I only came out because I needed to pee.”

  We smoked some more.

  At first, I didn’t feel a thing. But then a few minutes after inhaling the smoke, I had a sensation as though I were sitting in a perfect lukewarm current of water as it flowed and tickled every inch of my skin, tugging on me. It felt so wonderful.

  Max grabbed the flashlight and shined it on my face.

  “You’re smiling,” he said.

  “No I’m not.”

  “Cobie. Look. Mister Silent is smiling.”

  Cobie Petersen leaned into the light and confirmed Max’s opinion.

  “You’re smiling, kid.”

  I tried to regain my composure by concentrating on something real. I waved the copy of Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species in the center of the tight triangle we sat in.

  “Look. This book. She’s really crazy. Mrs. Nussbaum really does want to see all males die off. And she’s doing research on us.”

  “Us?” Max said.

  “With girl sperm?” Cobie asked.

  And then Cobie Petersen raised his hand and said, “Wait. Wait just a second. Have either of you guys ever in your life heard anything dumber than girl sperm?”

  For the next hour—it may have only been thirty seconds, but then again, it felt as though it were much, much longer—I tried my hardest to explain to Cobie and Max what Mrs. Nussbaum detailed in her book, but I kept getting confused and lost, and saying the same things over and over.

  Finally, Cobie Petersen told me: “Dude. Shut up. You’re stoned. Max, I have created a monster.”

  “The Dumpling Boy,” Max said.

  “I made him start talking, and now he won’t shut up.”

  Which, for whatever reasons, made me suddenly obsess on something I’d been dying to ask Cobie Petersen.

  I said, “Were you really telling the truth about the Dumpling Man getting you like that?” I pointed to Cobie’s shoulder.

  “It’s all true. He pooed all over me, then dug his claws in right here.”

  Cobie Petersen stretched out the neck of his T-shirt to bare the skin of his left shoulder. Max shined the flashlight’s beam directly onto the pale
moon of his shoulder, and Cobie traced an index finger along the track of the scar.

  “Maybe when we get out of here, you and your brother can come up to Dumpling Run and the three of us will go coon hunting and look for the Dumpling Man again. Because he is real. I’ve heard all the stories, and most of them are pure horseshit, but not what I told you guys last week at scary story time. I really saw him. He really did this to me.”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  And Max added, “You never know.”

  Cobie Petersen straightened his shirt and wobbled to his feet.

  “We better get back to Jupiter before we end up in trouble.”

  We found a place between three moss-covered boulders where we hid the things we’d stolen from the counselors’ locker room. I didn’t want to think about their reasons, but Max and Cobie decided they didn’t want to leave Horace’s condoms behind. And we laughed so hard we all nearly peed our pants when Max said he was going to go crazy if he didn’t stir up some of his favorite birthday pudding pretty soon.

  “How do you think up all these things?” I said.

  Max shrugged and said, “It’s like magic.”

  Then we turned off the flashlight, stowed it with the rest of our loot, and, barefoot, stumbled back to Jupiter.

  Before we came out of the woods, Max added, “And, Jesus, I am really hungry.”

  That was something Max never said.

  And Cobie Petersen told him, “We could go look for marshmallows in Earth.”

  “Let’s not,” Max answered.

  SUCK IT UP, ICEMAN

  Jupiter should have won the interplanetary tug-of-war competition that afternoon—we normally would have—but three of Jupiter’s boys were too tired after staying up most of the night, committing acts of thievery, reading terrifying nonfiction, and smoking pot in the woods.

  It was the most fun I’d ever had in my life.

  At least Max ate a big breakfast.

  Cobie Petersen propped his elbows on the picnic table and cradled his face in his hands.

  “I am so fucking tired. Why don’t they let us sleep late like regular boys?”

  Robin Sexton twitched his thumbs and rocked back and forth slightly, listening to nothing at all through his toilet-paper-and-kite-string earbuds.