Groans and jokes ricocheted within.
“Somebody’s leg is in my armpit.”
“Who’s drooling?”
“Drool? I thought that was ear-juice.”
“Is someone tickling?”
“Carol, that’s not funny. Don’t.”
“It is ear-juice. But it doesn’t taste like mine.”
The assemblage of bodies had created a network of Max-sized tunnels, so he began to crawl through. As he did, he felt like tickling everyone, so he did this, which turned up the volume on the laughing. It was deep, rumbling laughter, big vibrating laughter that shook the walls of the tunnels, changing them, and suddenly Max’s leg was trapped under a pile of flab and fur. He pulled at it, to no avail. He began to get claustrophobic and more than a little nervous.
In the wall of bodies, a head suddenly turned, and a pair of huge eyes opened, like two headlights coming alive. Max looked up. It was Katherine.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” Max said.
“Are you all right?”
“My foot’s stuck.”
With her free arm, she pushed someone’s blubber off and reclaimed his foot for him.
“Now you owe me,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. He liked the idea of owing her.
She looked at Max, grinning for a moment. “Wow, I can’t even look at you.”
She closed her eyes tightly.
“Why?” Max asked.
Her eyes remained closed, a wide smile on her face. “I don’t know. I guess you just seem good.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
She opened one eye, just a sliver.
“Yeah, wow. It’s almost unbearable.”
Max didn’t know what to say. Katherine opened her other eye just a bit now. “I’m getting used to it now,” she said, squinting. “But it’s like staring into the brightest light.”
Max smiled. Was there something new about him that she was seeing? His stomach was shooting all over, splitting, oozing down his legs — he liked this creature, her bright eyes and raspy voice, so much that he couldn’t control his interior.
“So why’d you come here?” she asked.
Max cleared his throat and thought of how he would explain it. “Well, I’m an explorer,” he answered, trying to sound professional. “I explore.”
“Oh, so no home or family?”
“No. Well. I mean …” This was a tough question, when Max really thought about it. What had become of his family? It seemed like months since he’d seen them. He tried to explain: “Well, I had a family but I—”
“You ate them?” she blurted, very excited.
“No!” Max gasped.
Katherine quickly backed away from her assumption. “Of course not! Who would do that?”
Max shrugged.
“So what did happen?” she asked.
Max wasn’t sure how to explain what had happened. “I don’t know,” he started. “I did something. I mean, I think I did stuff to make them not like me anymore.”
“So you left,” she said, matter of factly. “That makes sense. Will you go back?”
“No. I can’t,” he said. “I caused permanent damage.”
Katherine nodded gravely. “Permanent damage. Wow, that sounds serious.” Just as quickly, she brightened into a bigger, toothier smile than before. “Well, now you’re our king. Maybe you’ll do a good job here.”
Max really believed he could. “Yeah, I will,” he said.
Just then, a body on top of Katherine shifted and seemed to put extra pressure on her head. She looked pained, her expression changing from a sleepy smile to one of great contortion.
“You okay?” Max said.
“Yeah, I’m used to that kind of thing,” she said. “Well, good night,” Katherine said, though her face was still squashed.
“Night,” someone else said.
The beasts began to bid each other good night, and this turned into a hubbub of talk about the best parts of the rumpus.
Ira laughed. “Remember when we threw you, Judith? You were so beautiful.”
“I’m most beautiful flying through the air, is that what you’re saying? Was I beautiful when my head hit the rock?” She shrieked suddenly. “Hey, who’s tickling?”
Ira got it next. “Yow! I think it’s Carol. Is that you, Carol?”
Carol laughed. “Who, me? I would never—”
Judith snorted. “You haven’t tickled in years, Carol. Is this the influence of the new king? Do we have more tickling to look forward to?”
“I told you, it’s not me!” he said.
Then Judith shrieked again.
“Not there, Carol! I’m feeling vulnerable! No!”
As the rest of the pile calmed down and began to sleep and snore, Max crawled out of the pile-on to find fresh air. He settled on the edge of the fur mountain, putting his head on someone’s leg. The sky was just beginning to change, the world pulsing in the gauzy pink light of dawn. There was debris everywhere, like a landscape after an earthquake, and Max felt very much at home.
CHAPTER XXIII
Max was still half-asleep, his eyes closed, when he realized he was bouncing. There was a gentle wind on his face, and the air was cool and crisp. He wasn’t in the pile anymore, he figured — that smell had been strong, the air thick with sweaty fur. For a moment he feared he was back on the rolling sea, but when he opened his eyes he saw Carol’s huge yellowed horns on either side of him, and realized he was on Carol’s shoulders, being carried high above the earth.
“I didn’t want to wake you up,” Carol said. “But I’m glad you’re up now. I want to show you something.”
“Okay,” Max said, starting to take everything in. On one side, the sea below was gold and glittering and endless, the sky a loud cobalt blue. All the colors here, on this island, from his perch atop Carol’s shoulders, seemed triply bright and clear, vibrating.
Max reached atop his head. “Where’s my crown?”
“You don’t need the crown today,” Carol explained. “I put it under the fire for you.”
“Oh. Okay, thanks,” Max said. Only after a moment did he realize he didn’t know why his crown was under the fire. But it seemed to make sense to Carol, and he didn’t want to question the custom.
They walked away from the cliff and through the forest, the undergrowth strange and new — ferns of orange, moss of yellow, vines of marbled white.
Max tried to take it all in, but he was exhausted. He couldn’t have slept more than a few hours. And he was dirty. He smelled more of his own bodily secretions than ever before, and now his own smells had been amplified by the far more pungent odors of the beasts. He was not a lover of frequent cleanings of himself, but that morning he really had a hankering for a long hot shower.
“So how’d you get here?” Carol asked.
“Me? I sailed,” Max said.
Carol whistled matter-of-factly. “Wow. You must be an extraordinary sailor.”
“Yeah. But I don’t like sailing much,” Max said, suddenly remembering the boredom of it all, the ceaseless blinding glitter of the sun against the water.
“Yeah, me neither,” Carol said excitedly. “Sailing is so boring! And there’s nothing I hate more than being bored. If boredom was standing there in front of me right now” — he suddenly got louder — “I don’t know if I could restrain myself. I’d probably just eat him!”
They both laughed at this. Max knew exactly what Carol was talking about. Max had wanted to eat or kill so many boring things. Too many to mention.
Along the path, Max noticed a row of trees with holes bored in their trunks. The holes were tidy and round, about beast-height. Those must be Ira’s, he thought.
“You were talking to Katherine last night,” Carol said.
“The girl?” Max said. “Yeah, she’s nice.”
“Yeah, she is. She’s sweet. She’s … she’s uh …” Carol did a fake sort of chuckle. “I bet she told you some thing
s about me.”
“No,” he said, trying to remember. “No, she didn’t say anything.”
“She didn’t? No? Nothing?” Carol let out a big laugh, entertained by this. “That’s fascinating.”
Max and Carol continued down a winding path.
“Do you guys have parents?” Max asked.
“What do you mean?” Carol said.
“Like a mother and a father?”
Carol gave Max a puzzled look. “Of course we do. Everyone does. I just don’t talk to mine because they’re nuts.”
They passed through some of the most bizarre landscapes Max had ever seen or dreamt. Hills that pulsated like gelatin, rivers that changed direction in midstream, small trees whose trunks, almost translucent, swallowed the sunlight and spun it into something pink and glassine.
“See, Max,” Carol explained, as they left a forest and entered an area of grey-blue sand and tundra, “everything you can see is your kingdom. Everything on this island, pretty much. The trees with the holes in them are Ira’s, of course, and some of the beach is kind of Katherine’s, but otherwise it’s all yours. And then there are parts of the forest where animals will definitely kill you, even though you’re the king. They’re just willful, just don’t listen. But otherwise you’re definitely the supreme ruler, and you can do whatever you want with stuff. And if anyone tells you otherwise, or tries to eat your limbs or face, just come to me and we’ll crush them with rocks or something.”
Max agreed.
They entered a wide flat area, rocky and desolate. Max knew this kind of landscape from Mr. Wisner’s class. He climbed down from Carol’s shoulders to inspect his surroundings.
“See that rock?” Max said, pointing to a shard of curved obsidian. “It used to be lava. And someday it’ll be sand.”
Carol was greatly impressed. “And what will it be after that?”
“I don’t know …” Max said, stalling. “Maybe dust?”
“Dust, huh?” Carol said. “I thought you were going to say fire.”
They walked for a while, hearing only the wind.
“Did you know the sun is going to die?” Max asked.
Max blurted it out, unplanned. But now that the question was out, he was happy it was. He figured that Carol might very well have an answer.
Carol stopped and looked down at Max and then up at the sun. “What? That sun?”
Max nodded.
“Die? How could it die?” Carol asked, truly flummoxed.
“I don’t know. It’ll go dark and maybe become a black hole.”
“A black what? What are you talking about? Who told you something like that?”
“My teacher. Mr. Wisner.”
“Mister Wis-who? That doesn’t make sense.” Carol looked up again at the sun, standing still and shining bright. “Nothing like that’s gonna happen. You’re the king! And look at me. We’re big!” He held his hands out expansively, broadening his enormous chest. “How can big guys like us worry about a tiny little thing like the sun?”
Max smiled weakly.
“You want me to eat it, King?” Carol said. “I’ll jump up and eat that sucker before it can be dead or whatever.” He jumped up, grabbing for the sun with his hairy paw.
Max laughed. “No, no. Don’t,” he said.
“You sure? It looks juicy.”
“No, that’s okay.”
Carol put his hand on Max’s head. “Okay. But you let me know. C’mon, we’re almost there.”
They walked through the lava, and then through a maze of tall, sharp silver stones shaped like teeth. There were thousands of them, all around.
“Just wait till we get there,” Carol said, getting excited. “You’re gonna love it. If anyone would understand it, it would be you. I see the way you watch things. You have good eyes.”
Just then, an enormous animal — at least sixty feet tall — lumbered slowly by, far off in the distance, over a desert ridge. It looked a lot like a dog.
“What’s that?” Max asked, expecting to hear about a mythical creature with a mythical name.
Carol squinted and put his hand over his eyes to see better. “Oh, that’s a dog,” he said. “I don’t talk to that guy anymore.”
Max and Carol climbed up a steep hillside of oversized silver stones. Carol’s huge legs made climbing the giant rocks much easier than for Max. While Carol jumped from one to the next like he was walking up stairs, Max struggled to keep up, having to find toeholds in each boulder.
When he was just about too exhausted to continue, Max heard Carol’s voice from high above:
“We’re here. Or I am at least.”
Max looked up to see Carol standing in the entrance to a magnificent and dizzyingly intricate wooden structure built into the side of the mountain. The design was utterly its own, curvy like the homes they demolished on the first night, but it was far more complex and grand, a multi-tiered palace somehow anchored perpendicularly to the side of the cliff. Finally Max reached the flat stone on which Carol stood. Carol was grinning like mad.
“Ready?” Carol asked.
Max was heaving from the climb, but he couldn’t wait. He nodded.
Carol looked around to make sure no one had followed them, and then led Max inside.
CHAPTER XXIV
The room was high-ceilinged and wide and full of peach-colored light. It was a studio of some kind, messy and full of projects — kite-like contraptions hanging from above, hexagonal boxes all over the floor, everything carved with dizzying detail, patterns upon patterns. There were a hundred skylights above, all of them oval and allowing the brilliant sun, filtered by some kind of flesh-colored glass, into the room.
Max walked around slowly, taking everything in. There were contraptions everywhere, facsimiles of animals carved or assembled from wood and stone and gems. On the walls were endless drawings, paintings, diagrams, plans.
On the main worktable, an entire city was laid out, almost twenty feet long and six feet tall — buildings shaped like mountains and hills in an organized, almost grid-like format. The city’s architecture was similar to that of the village they destroyed — long straight lines, slowly curving, twisting like reluctant corkscrews. The details were immaculate and painstaking. It looked like it would have taken ten years to make. It was a model world — controllable, predictable, tidy.
“Did you make this?” Max asked, his voice an awed whisper.
“Yeah,” Carol said, looking at it anew through Max’s eyes.
“It’s really good,” Max said. “I wish I could shrink myself down and get inside it.”
Carol’s mouth opened wide into a goofy grin. “Well then, you should!” He guided Max under the table, where he had carved open a hole in the platform. Max popped up through the hole and now was in the middle of the model world.
“I’ve only shown this one other time, and she didn’t really get it,” Carol said, seeming pained even recalling the memory. Realizing his darkening mood, Carol changed the subject. “Oh! Put your eyes right here.”
Carol’s huge paws moved Max’s head so his eyes were at the street level of the model city. As Max was focused on the minutiae of the buildings, he heard the sound of water. Carol had tilted a jug, and soon water slowly flowed through the streets.
“I always thought it would be better if we had rivers to get around from place to place,” Carol said.
Max watched from ground level. The streets were now paved with water, and a tiny boat sailed through an intersection, in and out of view.
Now Max could see that the tiny boat held tiny, crudely carved facsimiles of Carol and Katherine. The rowboat soon merged with a boulevard carrying many other canoes, all holding creatures. Soon the canoe carrying Carol and Katherine took a turn — at a fork, it sailed left while the rest went right — and in a moment it ran into a pole, knocking the two models out of the boat. They promptly sank.
Max looked up at Carol, astounded. Carol didn’t notice — he was carefully working on a new structur
e for the model city. With great delicacy he carved into a thin sheet of wood with his pinkie claw.
It amazed Max how Carol, roped with muscle and easily seven hundred pounds, could work with such finesse. Max’s gaze drifted back to the city. He looked underneath the table. There was nothing there, just a few drips from where the streets leaked.
“What would happen under the city, with all this water?” Max asked.
“I don’t know,” Carol said, his curiosity piqued.
Max examined the underside more thoroughly.
“You could have a whole underwater world. It would be upside down and everything could hang from the ceiling like stalactites. There’d be fish under the streets. And the subway trains would have to be submarines.”
“Wow,” Carol said, pondering it all. “That’s a good point. Yeah. I like your brain, Max.”
Max smiled. It was the first time anyone had ever said that to him. He loved that Carol liked his brain.
Carol looked over the city, seeing it through Max’s eyes. “I love making buildings. This is the first one I ever made. I try to make buildings that feel good to be in. Like this. C’mere.”
Max took a step toward him. Carol suddenly enveloped Max in a bear hug.
“What’s that feel like?” Carol asked.
“Ummm, hairy? Warm. Good.”
“Yeah. I want to build a whole world like that. Have you ever been in a place that should feel good, but it feels out of control, like you’re really small? Like where all the people are made out of wind, like you don’t know what they’re going to do next?”
Max nodded vigorously.
“When?” Carol asked.
“Well,” Max said, surprised to be put on the spot. “This one time I went to my friend’s house, and everyone in his family had these huge mouths but no ears. And where they were supposed to have ears they just had more mouths so they couldn’t listen.”
Carol was rapt.
“And when you talked,” Max continued, “they couldn’t even hear you. Even the mom’s boyfriend had three mouths. And all they would do all the time is eat and talk.”