Arcadia (12 page)

When Bit’s heart has stopped its pounding, he washes the dried mud from his chest and shoulders, finds a bucket tied to a tree, and makes himself useful, watering.

He hides again in a cold pit in the willows and looks back toward Arcadia. He sees nothing, hears nothing but the ordinary sounds of the woods settling after his disturbance. A contrail puffs fat overhead. A muskrat draws two slender lines in the water. After some time he swivels his head and looks toward Verda’s cottage sending up its thin stream of smoke.

He has known Verda forever, since he was six. Before he knew these miles of woods like his own small body, he would get lost on his wanders. He met the old woman one night when he was in a snowstorm and dark was falling fast. He had lost a red mitten, and he put both his hands in the remaining one and held it in front of him as if it were a lantern to light his way. But the forest was avid: it wanted, that night, to eat him. Through spindrift he had trudged, through black. At last, he had smelled salvation in woodsmoke and followed it to a stone cottage squatting at the edge of a field. He knocked and knocked. The door fell open to the witch he’d first seen in the dark woods the spring before, the strange dog at her side that Bit had thought was a tamed white doe. Bit had been too tired and too cold to feel fear, until his wet clothes were off and there was a blanket on him, smelling of sun and lavender. Then the witch leaned into her woodstove and the light caught and underlined her sharp nose, her wrinkles, her lank hair, and some spark of a story alit in his head and Bit began to scream. From the hearth, the white beastie watched him, panting in the heat. The witch let Bit scream until he lost his voice, and when he did, she handed him a bowl of soup. It was venison, the first meat he had ever eaten. It tasted like death. He threw it up. He found himself in a truck, and Titus came to the Gatehouse door, Saucy Sally and the baby in the lanternlight behind him. Titus began to cry with relief: Oh, Bit, you’re found, he said, gathering him up in his great heavy arms. We thought you were froze to death. Bit looked back into the night, and the witch put her thumb on his chin. Little Ridley, she said softly. Come back and see your Verda sometime; and she disappeared from the dream he’d thought he was in.

Now he tries to send Verda brainwaves to bring a handful of shortbread and a blanket, but she doesn’t hear or heed his silent calls. He tries not to think of what would happen to him in a jail-type situation. He is so small still; he looks far younger than he is. He has heard bad stories of juvenile hall, filtered up from the runaways, and his mind shies away from ideas of violence and nasty food and never seeing his parents again. In the sky blazes Venus, a calm blue, and Bit thinks of last year’s syzygy, the alignment of planets, how Ollie was so convinced of apocalypse that he spent March in the reinforced tunnel between Arcadia House and the Octagonal Barn. When the anxiety gets to Bit, he rolls a green leaf into a little cigarette and lights it with the matches all Old Arcadia kids keep in plastic bags in their pockets, with Swiss Army knives and some gorp. When he’s calmer, he laughs quietly to himself and startles a chipmunk into a tree.

In the shadows of the trees, it grows cold. Bit’s cutoff jeans have dried on his legs, and he has to clutch his limbs to his torso to keep from shivering. Dusk thickens. The forest breathes in a way he can’t hear when he is amid the clamor of Arcadia. On the path a few hundred yards away there is a rustling, the distinct sound of human steps, and he stands, a rock absurdly heavy in his fist. But it is Hannah. She’s wearing the same ripped-sleeve flannel shirt and cutoff shorts as before but now has a knapsack on her back and her work boots on her feet, as if she were off for an innocent hike.

She presses a finger to her lips and wades across the stream. When she hugs Bit, she must feel how cold his skin is, and she takes off her shirt, baring her bra to the air. She drapes the shirt on him. It holds the warmth of her body in the weave, her bready smell. You’re the best, Little Bit, she whispers. Lila and Hiero weren’t too far away from me on the path, so be careful.

He carries the weight of her hug, a ghost of Hannah, on the run back home. He comes out into the Sheep’s Meadow in the pale twilight just as the gong begins to ring, calling the first shift of Arcadians, the most fragile, the Hens and Trippies and kidlets, to their supper.

Bit wakes, pulsing with dread. From his top bunk, Cole’s hand reaches out and pats him on the chest. Just sheep, Bit’s friend mutters, you’re okay.

Baa baa, murmurs Ike, still asleep in his own bunk.

Bit concentrates on ujjayi breath to calm himself, imagining the windmill in the back of his throat. The same nightmare has circled in Bit since he was little and Handy put actual sheep in the Sheep’s Meadow: not to exploit, he explained, they’re not
pets
and they won’t be
eaten,
but for their wool, which they gladly gave and which the Arcadians could sell. The kidlets loved the sheep; the women dreamed of woolen sweaters, lanolin on their chapped hands. Then Tarzan, who appointed himself shepherd, came down dizzy, with great open sores, and Astrid came speeding back from the hospital in Syracuse where the AmbUnit had rushed him, her hair wild, her face frantic. For hours, Abe and Handy and the midwives and Titus, the people who wore power in Arcadia then, conferred. That night, Bit woke to an unfamiliar stink. He crept out of the Children’s Dormitory to follow the acrid smoke. He found a grim group of three in the meadow around a bonfire. When he came closer the fire turned gruesome, the bodies of the sheep in a ziggurat within the flames. Bit watched a lamb’s eyeballs explode. He sat in the darkness, struck frozen until Astrid, who stood apart from Hank and Horse, brought a hand up to push her hair from her face, and her arms were blackened to the elbows with blood.

When a certain pressure builds in Arcadia—overcrowding, not enough food, the strange hidden undercurrents that make the adults’ faces pinch—the sheep come back to Bit’s dreams; sheep springing through the dark like live torches, the stench of burning fat. Over and over they leap until, at once, the creatures turn toward Bit. They crowd him, open their muzzles, almost say something. He knows it is something he couldn’t bear to hear, and he wakes almost screaming.

For hours, he waits for sleep. Shortly before dawn, he gives up. When he rises, he listens for his friends’ breath to stir. They sleep on. He opens the window to air out the room, the awful dead creatures that are Ike’s feet, the mixed adolescent body stink. He carefully dresses in his shirt and jeans. His broken sneakers mouth open when he walks, toes lapping the air like tongues.

Through the Ado Unit Common Room, through the hallways, plaster gapping and lath exposed, down the smooth polished banister for silence. Through the Library, heaped with
Whole Earth Catalogs
, old
New Yorkers
, silverfished books dug up from the basement where the first inhabitants had stashed them:
American Eclectic, Walden, News from Nowhere
. Also Carlos Castaneda, Julia Kristeva, Herman Wouk, paperbacks scavenged from Dumpsters or bought for a nickel. He slips through the Eatery, redolent of last night’s enchiladas. It is early for the Breakfast Shift, who will soon clang pans and stir yeast and soy into scrambled yegg and wash the apples, wormy but good. All is still and nobody is awake but Bit.

Out in the black, he runs down the slate steps by touch alone. The encampments across Arcadia are dark, only a few bobbing lights from afar, the flashlights of people rising for the loo. From the Bakery, a rich bread smell rises. His skin prickles with cold; dew flings from his heels to his back. There is a sharp edge to the sky, pine tanging the air, stones scattering like live creatures under his step. He runs as fast as his legs can take him, very fast for a body small as his, then slows to enjoy the darkness softening in the woods.

A cardinal flushes from a bush, but he has forgotten his new camera that his grandmother has sent him. He thinks of returning, but the run back is so far, and daybreak won’t wait for him.

One breath before dawn, he climbs the hill.

At the top, in a cluster of sweet William above the pines, he sits to watch day begin to hatch its yellow. A hawk stretches its wings and swirls as it rises. The fog rolls from the ground like a blanket and swiftly covers the distant mountains, the fields, the Pond, the streams; covers Amos the Amish’s far-off barn, the thin lace that is Verda’s smoke. A hungry creature, the fog; it gobbles. It climbs up the Terraces with the crooked apple trees. At last, only Bit and Arcadia House sit turned toward each other, each alone on a hill, above the fog’s milky sea. Two islands, they are, brightening in the dawn.

The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spin into nothing. Beyond Arcadia hulk the things he has dreamed of: museums, steel towers, pools, zoos, theaters, oceans full of strange creatures.

He knows that his understanding of the Outside is imprecise, both gleaned and muted. It is whatever makes its way to his ears, the stories people bring with them, what he has read. He has never been away from Arcadia since the Free People arrived when he was a toddler, not unless he counts Verda’s cottage at the edge of the forest, a tiny atoll of one. There have been times he’s been offered a ride to Summerton by the Motor Pool, or the chance to go with Hannah to visit the university library in Syracuse, but every time he has said no thank you. He is frightened of the Outside: either that it will be all that he imagines or that it won’t be.

Claus, a Circenses Singer, delights in asking Bit questions fit for babies:
How big is an elephant? What does a subway look like? How many people can Yankee Stadium hold?
Bit can understand only vaguely why Claus laughs until tears roll down his cheeks when Bit answers:
An elephant is as big as the Octagonal Barn? A subway is like a train of Volkswagen Beetles in a big steel tube? Yankee Stadium can hold . . . two thousand people?,
twice the size of Arcadia, and the limit of how large he can picture a crowd.

You kids, Claus says, sighing back into his chair, wiping his face. You’re like some crazy jungle tribe with bones in your noses. A sociologist would have a field day with you.

Bit knows this isn’t true. They’re not ignorant or innocent. From the Tutorials he chooses after the State Lessons in the morning, he knows local botany, the classics of English literature, geometry, physics, human physiology. He has assisted with over six birthings down at the Henhouse. He and the other Old Arcadia kids know how to play a guitar, bake and chop wood, pull pots and spin flax, knit their own socks and cultivate grains and vegetables, structure a good story, brew Slap-Apple out of windfall apples, and make anything at all from soy.

He feels no lack. If he concentrates, he can imagine the world in its many forms: the humid density of the jungle; the desert’s clean rasp of sand; the cold clarity of the Arctic. He imagines cities as larger Arcadias, but harder, meaner, people walking around thrusting cash at each other. He has seen the coins like embossed washers, the bits of green paper. Humans out there are grotesque: Scrooges and Jellybys and filthy orphans in the caverns of blacking factories, in lonely depopulated homes, a blight called television like tiny Plato’s caves in every room. It is grimmer in the Outside. There is a war in the Falkland Islands, there are Sandinistas and Contras, there are muggings and rapes, terrible things he has heard the adults talking about, has read about himself when he can find an old wrinkled paper in the Free Store. The president is an actor, placed in power to smoothly deliver the corporations’ lies. There are bombs among the stars and murders in the inner cities, red rain over London, there are kidnappers and slaves even now, even in America.

He has decided that he will leave for college when he is eighteen to study, to learn the magic of pulling images from the darkroom bath. He thinks of Erik at the send-off party, his flabby face radiant with the anticipated glamour of the Outside. Bit will borrow that same glamour for a few years, then come back to Arcadia forever. It will take him every day from now until he leaves to ready himself for what awaits him. He knows his only weapons against the threat of the Outside are knowledge and words: when anxiety bubbles up under his thoughts, he has to say Hannah’s name a hundred times or recite “Desiderata” until the words lose their meanings. If his thoughts skirt close to the forbidden, or he dreams stickily of little Pooh, who is only twelve but with a sweet body and full lips, or if, after his German lessons with Marlene, he runs to the darkroom to relieve the pressure in his pants, he makes amends to Helle in his head. He memorizes poems, and tells them in her direction:
She walks in beauty,
he thinks.
One man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face,
he thinks. And even with knowledge and words, he feels sometimes the dark news from Outside could crush him. He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance. This is the most magnificent thing about Arcadia, he knows. It is the shell that protects them.

The wind rises. A rock presses against his sitz bone, and the tide of fog draws off the hill. The first Breakfast Shift will be swarming up to Arcadia House. His face has dried, and the skin pulls taut. He can tamp down the nameless longing that arises in him only by running from the mountain as swiftly as his legs can go.

Bit returns to Arcadia in the full light of morning. He is wrung out. The woods seem deeper in the new light, less benign, like the dark forests in the Grimm book that peopled his childhood with nightmarish creatures. He finds a bush heavy with serviceberries and fills the belly of his teeshirt until he has to take it off and tie it into a sack so he can carry them all.

He can smell Arcadia before he sees or hears it: the loos are being pumped today. The Agri Unit will compost the shit, mix it with straw, and spread it on the fields for manure. The Sanitation Crew is already at work.