The Alex Crow (23 page)

I sat there for a moment, just thinking about all the things I wanted to say, and not knowing where to begin. I was shaking; I felt myself starting to cry.

“How could you do something like that to me?”

I honestly didn't think he would answer me.

Then Major Knott said, “I'm sorry, Ariel. But I took you out of that place, too.”

“You fucking destroyed me, is what you did. You can't just use people like that.”

And then I thought, what a stupid thing to say. Apparently Major Knott, my father, the Merrie-Seymour Research Group could use people—or birds, cats, frozen devil-monkeys, and flying invisible boxes—any number of ways they wanted to.

Major Knott looked hurt. He put his hand on my shoulder but I pushed him away.

“Look, Ariel—”

“No. You look. What am I to you? A cat? A crow? Some fucking experiment so you can take the controls? I'm a human being. You can't just—How could you do this to people?”

A tear dripped from my chin.

Major Knott lowered his voice. “I'm sorry. I do care about you, Ariel. I do. You have to know that.”

What could anyone ever know?

“Did you do it to Max? To Cobie Petersen?”

Major Knott swallowed and shook his head. “No. You were the first person for Alex Division. Well, the first one in ten years. I promise. I'm very sorry, Ariel. We weren't going to use you anymore. I promise. What can I say? I'm so sorry. You weren't supposed to know. Nobody should have known.”

I hadn
'
t seen Major
Knott since the Sunday morning when I rode Max's bicycle over to Stoney Creek Road. I went back there one time to bring some flowers to Mrs. Le, the cigarette-smoking woman who'd bandaged my arm after I crashed. I suppose I still couldn't figure out why some people will go out of their way to help a complete stranger and, on the other hand, why others will treat someone they care about as though they're disposable objects.

And I know Major Knott cared about me, which made the whole thing even more puzzling.

Before I left his house that day, Major Knott gave me the little controller that turned
Ariel Jude Burgess
on and off. He promised—for whatever that was worth—that there was no other way for Alex Division to use me, to look through my eyes and hear what I was hearing, and he told me I could do what I wanted to with the device. When I rode away, I almost felt as though Major Knott expected me to go steal something and bring it back for him, as Isaak did, even if it was something completely worthless, like a bag of clothespins, just to affirm Major Knott was at the controls and the plane was flying just fine.

I kept Major Knott's device for a few days, and then I threw it into Dumpling Run without telling anyone my last, little, terrible story. Why should I give something like that to Cobie Petersen or Max? There was no way to fully trust or believe Major Knott, anyway, and like Cobie said, maybe all three of us really had been chipped.

Who would ever know?

After coming home from Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Max and I spent most of our free time over at Cobie Petersen's house. And whereas Major Knott had given me credit for figuring out how I'd been used by Alex Division to keep an eye on my own father and also to watch what Mrs. Nussbaum, who mysteriously vanished that summer, was doing with the boys at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, I figured something else out, too—and it was something nobody at Alex Division had caught on to.

It was this: Cobie Petersen's two younger sisters, Kelly and Erica, were the girls Mrs. Nussbaum referred to in her book about male extinction—the ones who'd been created with
girl sperm
. That was another story that would never leave Ariel's library.

Erica, who was almost fifteen, liked me very much—I could tell. And I liked her, too, which gave Max sufficient reasons to tease us both incessantly.

- - -

In September, before the fall session of our tenth-grade year started at William E. Shuck High School, Cobie Petersen took me and my American brother Max out coon hunting with him and his dog, Ezra.

I don't think Max or I wanted to actually see Cobie Petersen kill a raccoon; we just liked spending time with him.

Cobie was the only one in our hunting party who carried a rifle. Shortly after midnight, as we trudged through the dense woods along the bank of upper Dumpling Run, Cobie Petersen stopped us by raising his hand and saying, “Gents, I do believe coon hunting's a bust tonight.”

“The three bears are going to go home empty-handed,” Max said.

“It's a great night to be a coon,” I said.

“And a sad night to be a talking bear,” Cobie added.

And as though to punctuate our misjudgment with an exclamation point, Ezra immediately started howling and barking, running wildly through the brush after what sounded like a monstrous raccoon.

“Oh, shit,” Cobie said. “Let's get this one.”

And the three bears took off in the direction of Ezra's baying.

- - -

Here is the Dumpling Man, who in another life was called Katkov's Devil, the Siberian Ice Man, another immigrant in Sunday, another one of the things Jake Burgess and Alex Division brought back from the dead—like me.

The pale thing with horns and hands sat hunched down on a branch six feet over our heads in the West Virginia woods.

Cobie Petersen aimed his rifle at the snorting creature as Max shined a blinding flashlight beam at the thing in the tree.

“
See? I told you he's real
,” Cobie whispered.

Ezra barked and barked.

The thing looked exactly as I pictured it from Mrs. Nussbaum's book and from Cobie Petersen's scary story. But after hearing all the legendary rumors about the Dumpling Man, I never would have imagined him to be less than four feet tall, which is a rather generous estimation of the little horned man's height.

Still, he was kind of scary looking. I suppose if I had been more infused with biblical images, I may have thought, as others had, that here was the devil himself, but I found myself feeling sorry for the small, naked, and sparsely white-haired creature.

Who could say how long he'd been trapped in ice, only to end up here in Sunday without any say in the matter at all?

“
Don't shoot him
,” I whispered.

“I'm not going to shoot him,” Cobie Petersen told me. “If I was going to shoot him, he'd already be dead.”

Then Cobie snapped his fingers at Ezra, who instantly stopped barking and sat down.

“Then what are we going to do with him?” Max said.

The Dumpling Man cocked his head at the sound of Max's voice, then he leaned forward from his perch, straining with his big amber eyes to see us three boys below him.

“Nothing,” Cobie said. “Leave him alone.”

“
It would be cool if people could see him
,” Max whispered.

“Why?” I asked.

Max shrugged. “Yeah. Probably not.”

Then the Dumpling Man said, “I don't just let
anyone
find me, you know?”

And my brother Max raised his hand above his head, straining to lift himself as high as his tiptoes could get him, and held his fingers out just below the little man.

The Dumpling Man smiled a toothy grin that seemed to split his head in two. He reached down and touched Max's hand.

And Max turned off the flashlight that had been shining on Katkov's beast, and said, “Let's just leave him alone.”

So much for extinction.

Here is a fishing lure,
wedged between two flattened rocks at a depth of three feet in a slow bend of a creek called Dumpling Run.

The lure is what boys here call a plug, carved from basswood with an inset glass-bead eye, painted red at the diagonal slash of the mouth with hexagonal dots of yellow to mimic the scales on a minnow trailing back along its tapered length.

A double hook dangles from the front, a triple from the tail.

When the three boys uncover it, they are hunting crayfish for bait. The epoxied wooden lure has been wedged between those unmoving flat rocks in Dumpling Run for more than half a century.

Here is Natalie Burgess,
standing alone in aisle seven of the Sunday Walk-In Grocery Store. The sauerkraut she prefers, Mason-Dixon brand, has been moved to a lower shelf.

- - -

Outside the market, cars speed by along South Fork Route. Natalie's Volvo is parked across the street.

- - -

Here is a handful of dirt
—just dirt from a field where I played with my friends on my fourteenth birthday. And here, too, are all the things in the terrible stories we pile and pile in our library that is always at capacity, and also is never full—ice, dogs, cats, coffee, clowns, and crows.

- - -

Here in the frozen room
beneath the Empire Hotel, among vast stores of food provisions is a doctor named Alexander Merrie. He smokes a pipe as he sits hunched over his journal and writes an entry to a man who will never read it.

T
HURSDAY
, J
ULY
30, 1903—
N
EW
Y
ORK

I had to look back in my journals I'd kept during the
Alex Crow
expedition to be certain just how many years it has been since Mr. Warren and I brought Katkov's beast out from the ice. How would I have ever guessed where I would be today?

There are times—many of them in my life—when it has been impossible to think about the future.

Lately I find myself wondering more and more about the stories that have been frozen—for how many years before Mr. Warren, Murdoch, and I first caught a glimpse of you?—in the timelessness of your captivity. And it was purely out of the need to allow the one thing that was a certainty be known—that you existed at all, man, devil, or beast—which drove us to bring you back as evidence of our reason, and our stewardship of this world. And so I've come more often to sit here among Mr. Seymour's impossible stock of food, and look at you while I write. It brings me back, in my mind, to that spring on the Lena River Delta when I myself crawled from the ice.

Twenty-three years today! And sadly, fifteen of those years have passed since Mr. Warren was lost to us.

It's a sort of a birthday, I should say—a birth from the ice, into ice, and now, only to wait to be born once again. And when that happens, what stories we all will have to tell!

- - -

Here is our pet,
a crow named Alex, who should not be alive, taunting a neighbor's cat through an obviously opened window.

- - -

Here is an immigrant kid
, a second son named Ariel, who has lived, and lived, and lives again, in a place called Sunday.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Someone once said this to me: “
Careful Is My Middle Name
will NOT be the title of your memoir, Andrew.”

That someone is actually Julie Strauss-Gabel, the editor and publisher of
The Alex Crow
. I must thank Julie for an uncountable assortment of things—among them, for her intelligence, dedication to producing the best books possible, for being patient with me, for asking the best questions, for making me be a better writer, and for pulling me in when I became a little less than careful. Also, for giving me the title for the memoir I will one day write:
Careful Is My Middle Name Is Not the Title of This Memoir.

If I did write a memoir, I'm pretty sure—given its title—it would not be very boring, but I would feel obligated to name names, which would not be very careful of me. And if my life were a movie, I would cast it as follows:

• The no-bullshit golf partner—played by Amy Sarig King.
  
• The reliable, understanding, and calm therapist—played by Michael Bourret.
  
• The conspiratorial drinking buddy—played by Michael Grant.
  
• The other boy in Christa Desir's and Carrie Mesrobian's “Boy Cabal”—played by Ted Goeglein.
  
• The incredible survivors who introduced me to Ariel Burgess—played by my English-language learner students.
  
• The people I love most in this world—played by Jocelyn, Chiara, and Trevin Smith.
  

You all give me so much, and I am incalculably thankful.

Oh . . . and the crow is played by Oprah, our hen, who just sits there and stares.

There's something a little off with that bird.

THIS IS THE TRUTH. THIS IS HISTORY.

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD.

AND NOBODY KNOWS

ANYTHING ABOUT IT.

YOU KNOW

WHAT I MEAN.

Boston Globe-Horn Book
winner

A 2015 Michael L. Printz Honor Book

“Raunchy, bizarre, smart and compelling”

—Rolling Stone

“A literary joy to behold . . . reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse Five
, in the best sense.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“An absurdist
Middlesex
 . . . and is all the better for it. A-”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Nuanced, gross, funny and poignant, it's wildly original.”

—The San Francisco Chronicle

“Once you get lost in
Grasshopper Jungle
you won't want to be found.”

—Geekdad.com

“Filled with gonzo black humor.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review