The Alex Crow (4 page)

All the planets were tied
for last place, depending on how you looked at things.

You could just as well claim we were all racing in yellow jerseys on that night after the cancellation of the archery competition. Every planet in the solar system of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, including the abandoned ones, had a score of zero.

I was uncertain what rewards winning at the end of six weeks at camp would bring; if the object of
winning
in itself provided its own intrinsic riches. But I had been in war, and that was somewhere none of the other kids at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had been. So perhaps I had a polluted perspective on the whole notion of winning—of beating your rivals—and what that meant in the overall scheme of things.

But this is what we do at camp; winners make losers, and losers make winners.

Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys' mess hall wasn't much of a hall. It was a massive structure that some people might describe as a pavilion, a minimalist construction of more than a dozen or so log stilts that supported a peaked and shingled roof with lots of picnic tables beneath it. And all the tables were notched and carved, too. It seemed that the most popular word in camp-carving language was
fuck
, but I didn't look at every single tabletop, so I can only estimate.

A few weeks after I came to America, I thought it would be nice if I could invent a new language. I didn't tell anyone about it, because the first thing people say to you when you tell them you are making up a new language is this: “Say something in it.”

I wasn't ready to start saying things yet.

I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for
me
or
you
. Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages. In any new language, there should only be
we
.

We
do everything, and everything
we
do,
we
do to
us
.

That would have to be the first rule.

At dinner we sat beneath the pavilion roof and ate hamburgers and mashed potatoes with gravy. There was red Jell-O, too. I'm not sure what flavor the red Jell-O was supposed to be. It was sweet and rubbery. And red. Robin Sexton spooned some of his red Jell-O into the diamond-shaped opening on the paper carton of low-fat milk that came with every camper's meal. Then he closed it and shook it up. Robin Sexton drank it. What dribbled from the corners of his mouth looked like salmon-colored vomit. He also put his mashed potatoes and gravy
inside
his hamburger.

Max just stared at the kid. Max didn't eat much.

It was a very strange meal. The planets segregated themselves as planets will do, locked in isolated orbits at separate tables. So as much as we probably did not like each other, the four boys of Jupiter sat alone near the outer edge of the pavilion.

Although other counselors sat among their wards, Larry chose not to eat with us.

Some of the counselors brought acoustic guitars to the pavilion. At the end of dinner they were going to sing to us and teach us camp songs, because this was all part of rediscovering the fun of being boys.

“If anyone attacks, we should all run that way,” Max said. He pointed to an opening at the edge of the yard that led into the trees of the surrounding black woods. We had walked the trail with Larry that morning before the archery disaster. About a half mile down the path was a spring that filled a cinder-block well house with icy water.

“Are you always thinking about escape routes?” Cobie Petersen asked.

Max nodded. “It's what I do.”

Cobie said, “Who would attack, anyway?”

“Some of those fuckers from Mars look like psychopaths.”

Max had a point.

“Hey. Kid. Kid.”

Cobie made an attempt at getting Robin Sexton's attention. He waved his palm in front of the kid, but Robin had his face down over his Styrofoam plate so that his nose was just an inch above what remained of his hamburger bun.

Cobie Petersen tapped Robin Sexton's head and pointed at his ears.

“Huh?”

“Take that shit out of your ears.”

Robin tweezered his fingers into his ears and popped out the two compacted beads of toilet paper. They were impressively large. Also, one of them had a smear of pumpkin-colored earwax on it.

“What?” Robin said.

Cobie Petersen asked him this: “Were you really jerking off in bed last night?”

All the eyes of Jupiter were riveted on Robin Sexton, who, despite the dimness of evening, turned visibly red and bit his lip. This concerned me. I slept about sixteen inches away from Robin Sexton, and so did Max.

“No,” Robin said. But if the boys of Jupiter could act as a fair jury, Robin Sexton would have been convicted on the spot.

Robin added, “I. Uh. I sleepwalk. I had to make myself stay awake.”

Cobie Petersen shook his head. “Jerking off is not a good way to keep yourself awake, kid. It just makes you tired.”

Max nodded. “Punching the clown puts me to sleep, too, but I would never do it in Jupiter, with all you other dudes around. Gross.”

I was horrified. This was not the first time since coming to America I had to sit through a conversation about jerking off. Max even talked about jerking off in front of our parents! They never knew what he meant, though, because he'd make up his own words for it, like
punching the clown
. Sometimes he'd talk about
helping his best friend get an oil change
, or
going out for a shake with my best friend
. But one night, he explained it to me in excruciatingly clinical detail. Max told me that all “normal” American boys constantly
cooked soup
, and that I'd have to stop acting like such an uptight immigrant kid and loosen up. And a number of the boys in my classes at William E. Shuck High School talked about jerking off as casually as you'd talk about going to the movies, or what you ate for lunch.

Robin Sexton swallowed hard and then only stared—at Cobie, then Max, then me.

Then he replaced his toilet paper earplugs and put his face back down in his food.

Dinner ended with the agonizing song-singing that was a scheduled nightly event at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. Larry came back from wherever he'd been hiding, and the six counselors, with two guitars, a tambourine, autoharp, and a cowbell, commanded all the planets to join in singing three songs I had never heard before. The first two songs were called
“Kum Ba Yah” and “Do Your Ears Hang Low?”

And I was not the only boy unfamiliar with these songs, since they played no part whatsoever in the culture of video gaming and social networking. So the counselors passed out photocopied lyrics sheets and made us sing, sing, sing, until we got the songs stuck in our heads for good.

Also, the counselors encouraged us all to sing the word
balls
instead of
ears
during our multitudinous renditions of “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” Everyone thought this was very daring and funny. I thought it was as demented as having a conversation about
punching the clown
over dinner.

But the worst thing was the third song. Nobody except the counselors and Max knew the third song, because it did not exist anywhere outside the solar system of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. Max knew it because he'd been required to sing this same song during his summer at fat camp. The song was called “Boys of Camp Merrie-Seymour,” and it went like this:

Merrie-Seymour Boys!

We're Merrie-Seymour Boys!

We're learning healthy habits,

Smart as foxes, quick as rabbits!

When people see us they turn and stare,

Merrie-Seymour Boys are everywhere!

We're fit and strong, as hard as granite,

We come from every single planet!

So cheer and make a happy noise—

For US, the Merrie-Seymour Boys!

For US, the Merrie-Seymour Boys!

When we shouted “US” in the last lines, we were supposed to clap. We looked like thirty-two (now that Bucky Littlejohn had been hospitalized) barking circus seals. I clapped, but I did not shout. I did not even sing. I moved my mouth like a beached trout and pretended. But the counselors made the boys sing the song at least a dozen times until we were loud enough to please them, all clapped with a reasonable sense of trained-seal rhythm, and had the inane lyrics permanently ingrained into our memories.

Larry was in a good mood while we were singing, but not because of the songs. He was in a good mood because he was drunk. We didn't find out about the bottles of vodka and other stuff Larry kept hidden in the counselors' clubhouse until later, but he was drunk, and I could tell, even if the other boys of Jupiter didn't notice such things.

Before bedtime, all the planets retreated to their individual campfires. I'd heard stories from some of the boys at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys that when they stared into their fires they frequently hallucinated they were playing a video game.

The boys of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys were seriously damaged.

Larry told us we all needed to go take showers and brush our teeth before he'd light the fire, but we whined and complained about showering in the spider cave, so he backed off and told us we could go ahead and stink if we wanted to.

But he added a warning: “If it reeks like ass and feet in Jupiter tonight, I'm kicking all you fuckheads out and you're hitting the showers—dark, spiders, fucking Sasquatches, whatever.”

I was unfamiliar with this new word—
Sasquatch
—but the other boys seemed to understand what Larry meant and take it in stride. Robin Sexton always had the same take-it-in-stride look on his face, anyway, probably on account of the toilet paper in his ears and not being confronted about masturbation, so who could tell whether that kid had any clue what Larry was talking about? Considering the preceding modifier Larry used, I assumed that a
fucking Sasquatch
was American slang for a sexual deviant who preyed on boys at summer camp.

If so, he could have Robin Sexton, I thought.

Larry sat in a folding chair at the edge of our Jupiter fire ring. We had to sit in the dirt.

Larry said, “You guys got any scary stories?”

This was also new to me. I had plenty of scary stories, but I didn't think anyone really wanted to hear them.

Max said, “Why? I thought we already did the Mrs. Nussbaum encounter thing once today.”

“No.” Larry licked his lips and shook his head a little too quickly. His chair nearly tipped over.

Larry continued, “Don't you guys know
anything
? You're supposed to tell scary stories around the campfire.”

Cobie Petersen raised his hand.

Larry sighed. “What?”

“Do
you
know any scary stories, Larry?” Cobie asked.

Larry did.

Let me tell you this, Max:
When I came out of the refrigerator, there honestly was no place for me to stay. I had to go along with the soldiers who'd come to the village after the gas attack.

They were nice to me, anyway. I think it may have had something to do with the clown suit—how it made me look like a baby, even if I had just turned fourteen. Although they smoked, they never offered their cigarettes to me.

It seems so long ago, Max. It's why I tell you it was my first life, as though I had been resurrected at some point—at least once—before we ever met.

I asked Thaddeus, the man who'd taken off his mask first, if it was the Republican Army who'd gassed the village, and he told me, no, that it was the FDJA rebels. What else would he say? Depending on how long I'd actually been inside that refrigerator, there were probably dozens of videos that had already been posted on the internet assigning blame to any imaginable party. And everyone knows whichever video scores the largest number of hits would be the one that tells the true story, right?

So I went with Thaddeus.

We rode in the open back of a dusty troop carrier with nine other soldiers. Our truck drove in a convoy of military vehicles, some of which towed weapons that looked like missile launchers. Although there was a metal frame to support a canvas covering for our truck's bed, there was no tent, so we all sat there exposed to the heat, dust, and sun. The men were so tired they slept in the rattling bed, slumped over wherever they fit. The soldiers lay atop coiled serpents of ammunition—bands of oily bullets as long as my forearm. The men were uninterested in me, or how I'd come to be there dressed as I was.

But Thaddeus was nice to me. He'd told me that he had two sons at home, and he promised me that everything would work out for me now that I was safe and away from the village. He shared his water and food with me.

In the afternoon we rode through another small city. I did not know the place; I had never been there. But when the convoy drove down the main avenue, the people lined the street and crowded the balconies above to watch us. It was so quiet, or maybe it was just that any sound the people may have been making was drowned out by the clank and roar of our convoy.

Young men followed along on motorbikes and scooters, or they ran like snakes along the crowded sidewalks, as though it were a sort of festive parade, and this was the best thing that had happened in memory.

From time to time jets flew by, low in the sky overhead. We could hear the explosions from the missiles they fired miles ahead of us, beyond flat farmland and low mountains.

That night we slept outside on a dirt road that ran through a sesame field.

I woke sometime in the darkest part of the night. There was no moon, only stars. I didn't know it, but Thaddeus had been sitting next to me, watching me as I slept. He'd given me a blanket to lie on, and it was so warm that I was damp with sweat.

“Are you all right?” Thaddeus asked.

“Yes. It's hot, and I'm not very tired.”

“Can I tell you something?” he said.

“Sure.”

“It's not a good thing,” Thaddeus said, “but I feel I need to tell somebody. And I think you're the person to say it to.”

“Why me?”

Thaddeus shook his head. “I don't know. Maybe it's the white suit.”

“It's not as white as it was when I put it on,” I said.

“No matter,” Thaddeus said.

He scooted toward my blanket and leaned close, so he could whisper. “When I was a boy—I was—how old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“You're fourteen?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were just a baby.”

“Maybe it's the white suit,” I said.

Thaddeus nodded. “When I was nine years old, my mother became very sick with cancer. She was dying. It was terribly slow and ugly to witness. My father never talked to me about it. Not one time did he ask me how I was feeling, or what I was thinking about. Do you know?”

“I think so.”

“I was so angry about everything, but my father never spoke to me about it.”

“It must have been sad. I don't have any parents, and now my aunt and my uncle—”

“Yes. Maybe that's why I need to say this.” Thaddeus leaned toward my shoulder. His breath was hot as he whispered. “We had a small dog then. His name was Pipo.”

“That's a good name.”

“I was so mad about everything. Outside our house, there were fields of wheat growing. One morning, I took Pipo into the field and dug a deep hole. Then I put the little dog in the hole and I buried him. Nobody knew what I did. That evening my father asked where the little dog was, and I lied to him and told him I didn't know; that maybe he ran away. It was a terrible thing. I feel so bad about what I did. I think about it every day.”

I could see Thaddeus was crying.

“I never told anyone about it until now. I was a monster, but I couldn't control myself.”

“Maybe that little dog was the only thing you could control.”

“I hate myself still.”

What could I say to the man? It was almost as though, in the telling, he were pouring the story of the little dog into me—this receiving vessel dressed in a clown suit—and now it would be my responsibility to carry Thaddeus's story along with me for how many more years.

“Eventually, I suppose you'll have to find a way to make things right,” I said.

“That's why I'm telling you. You need to say how I can do this.”

“Why me?”

“Because, when I found you, it was as though you'd come out of a hole,” Thaddeus explained.

I shrugged.

“It was a refrigerator. I needed to pee.”

- - -

Jake Burgess worked
in a semiautonomous laboratory owned by the Merrie-Seymour Research Group. It was called Alex Division. This is where nearly everything Jake Burgess invented came from, including our pet, Alex.

Jake always had a fascination with crows. He told me it was due to the birds' uncanny intelligence and their ability to adapt to just about any situation that confronted them. The first Alex crow was a gift from Jake to Natalie just after the birth of Max, my American brother, who did not like me and was exactly sixteen days older than I was.

I say “first” Alex because that bird died when Max was ten months old and I lived in a dirty village halfway around the world from Sunday, West Virginia. Well, to be honest, the crow only sort of died when Max and I were ten months old.

Jake Burgess brought both of the Alex crows back to life. They were like photocopied beings that would never change, and never leave. Alex, our crow, was a member of a species that had been extinct for a century.

At that time, my father, Jake Burgess, was investigating a method for perfecting de-extinction for Alex Division. Of course, both the word and the concept of
de-extinction
are entirely ridiculous.

Extinction can't be undone, or else you were never extinct in the first place. You were just waiting for something better than eternal death.

There was always something a little
off
about the things Jake Burgess brought back to life. At least, that's what Max told me. I couldn't exactly say I
knew
any of the other Alex animals created by Jake Burgess, so I had nothing to compare our pet to. Still, our resurrected pet bird did strike me as being empty of any kind of soul, and overwhelmingly disappointed by his existence.

Sometimes I wondered if Max had been emptied out and brought back to Sunday just like Alex, in some cruel experiment researched by his father, or that perhaps I had been brought back like our crow, too.

It's funny how I remember some events in my life so clearly, and others—often recent ones—seem disjointed and fuzzy. I attribute that to nervousness, I suppose. It's a very frightening thing, when you think about it, being dug up from a hole or extracted from a refrigerator and then finding yourself some kind of display artifact for everyone to marvel over (
See the kid who shouldn't actually be here!
). But I can't clearly remember all the details surrounding my arrival at the Burgess home in Sunday. I remember riding in a van with Jake Burgess and a man named Major Knott from a place called Annapolis, which I had never heard of before. Also, I remember all the trees and water—we crossed so many rivers on the way—things I'd only seen in pictures.

The Burgess house was a single-story brick home built into a hill with a garage and basement underneath the main floor. We walked up a gravel driveway to the front door, where Natalie and Max—who had taken the day off from school to meet his new foreign brother—waited.

Natalie held my face and kissed me on top of my head. It made me feel nice.

And Max said to me, “What's your name, kid?”

“Uh.”

Natalie patted Max's shoulder. “Don't be silly, Max. We've told you. His name is Ariel.”

Max said, “Oh yeah. Ariel,” and walked away.

But they pronounced it correctly.

I went inside with Jake Burgess and Major Knott, who carried a cloth bag containing the new clothes and things they'd given me when I got to Annapolis. The house was dark and smelled like nothing I had ever smelled before. It was the smell of America, I'd supposed, a combination of furniture polish, cleanser, and cooking oil.

In the living room, behind an old tufted chair, stood a type of black rounded perch. And on that perch was the Burgesses' crow, Alex. He was staring at me, holding perfectly still. I honestly thought he was some sort of decoration; I never imagined people kept such creatures in their homes.

But then Alex moved his head slightly and said, “Punch the clown. Punch the clown.”

It was nothing more than a frightening coincidence. Eventually I came to realize Alex learned much of his vocabulary from Max.

- - -

Joseph Stalin was not
the only voice inside Leonard Fountain's melting head. The melting man also heard someone named 3-60.

3-60 was not as mean or harmful as Joseph Stalin. While Joseph Stalin urged Leonard Fountain to kill people, 3-60 said nice things to the melting man. 3-60 liked to narrate to Leonard Fountain everything that he was doing, as though she were telling the story of the melting man's life while it played out in real time.

“You are turning onto Smale Road.”

“Yes. I am,” the melting man said to 3-60.

“You are driving past a cemetery. You are looking at the headstones. Your balls are itchy. You are drifting off the road.”

The melting man swerved back onto the highway.

“Thank you for saving my life, 3-60.”

“You're welcome, Lenny.”

That reminded the melting man of his younger brother, who was the only person who'd ever called him Lenny.

“But your balls still itch,” 3-60 reminded him.

“Oh yeah.”

“Now they hurt.”

“Well, I shouldn't have scratched them,” the melting man said.

“You're very sick,” 3-60 told him. “Maybe you should consider leaving the masterpiece somewhere along the side of the road and just moving on.”

“I have to do what Joseph Stalin told me to do. I don't want to make him angry.”

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

“Yes. I am.”

T
UESDAY
, F
EBRUARY
17, 1880—
A
LEX
C
ROW

While the
Alex Crow
sank, the crew managed to pull two of the ship's longboats, as well as the dog sleds, food, and equipment from the doomed vessel.

Mr. Warren could not assist the off-loading due to his incapacitation. However, in this past week, Mr. Warren's hand has healed significantly, although he has lost a great deal of mobility due to the shattered bones. Imagine the predicament of a newspaperman who lacks the ability to put pen to paper! Mr. Warren has been dictating to Murdoch, but the man is constantly frustrated by Murdoch's deficiencies in skill.

Let me express how disheartening it was to see the last timbers of the
Alex Crow
being shut up behind the mouth of this hellish Arctic ice. It was a mournful event for us all, because despite our predicament there was always some insulating sense of safety provided to our little society by the formidable ship. Now we are stripped of nearly everything and left to make some way, which I fear is only a lengthening of our journey toward doom. I cannot believe any of us will survive now.

After a full day's rest on the ice pack, Captain Hansen and Mr. Piedmont calculated a direction for our attempt at reaching the New Siberian archipelago. The journey has been incredibly arduous—the men work without rest, dragging the burdensome boats over impossible crags of relentless ice. Two days ago, on Sunday, it seemed as though our party had only managed to cover a few hundred feet for the entire day's labor.

The cost on the men has been significant. Yesterday morning, Mr. K. Holme, a naval seaman, succumbed to the cold, and today our expedition's ice pilot, Edgar Baylor, passed away shortly after dawn.

Our crew has lost all hope of rescue. I am afraid that if there was any reasonable alternative to Captain Hansen's strategy to reach New Siberia, there certainly would be mutiny among the survivors.

S
UNDAY
, F
EBRUARY
22, 1880—
A
LEX
C
ROW

A most remarkable occurrence—we reached open water today!

Could it be that those of us who have endured this ordeal will survive? Mr. Murdoch during this past week has taken to uttering a repetitive chant of sorts—“Why bother?” he asks again and again. It does give one pause, at times, to consider the point of it all. Why is the will to survive—in spite of the horrors of one's condition—so profound?