The Alex Crow (3 page)

It was hot and stuffy inside
the walk-in refrigerator where I hid the day of the slaughter at the schoolhouse.

It may be difficult for you to believe, Max, but electricity only came to the village once or twice per week, so the refrigerator had never performed its duties as far as I could recall. Maybe it did function as something other than a clown's hideout at some point in time. Maybe there were legends passed down from the elders of the village about an era when the refrigerator was cold, and also contained food.

Despite the fact that there was nothing edible inside the refrigerator, I could not bring myself to pee there when I needed to.

Nobody pees inside refrigerators, even ones with no food in them. I would be in trouble if anyone ever found out I'd peed inside our school's refrigerator.

But, as desperate as my urge to pee was, I was too afraid to go outside.

I thought about things. I wondered who was safe in the village, and if my cousins, my uncle, and aunt had been looking for me—or if they assumed I'd gone off with the other boys to become a rebel with the FDJA.

So I tried to devise a mathematical formula based on the concept of predicting when, exactly, the need to pee would surpass my fear of being shot while dressed in a clown suit. As I thought about this, I curled up on my side and fell asleep on the floor.

It is possible that I was inside the refrigerator for days. Who could ever know? Refrigeration—even when the refrigerator in question does not produce coldness—has a way of slowing down time. But I do know this: The mathematical breaking point at which I overcame my fear of going outside occurred sometime before I opened my eyes.

I needed to go.

So picture this, it is a disturbing image: a fourteen-year-old boy wearing a white clown suit, peeing into the gutter along a street in a village where none of the residents is alive.

Everyone had disappeared or lay dead. Their bodies were scattered randomly as though they simply had the life force sucked away from them while they went about their daily drudgeries.

It was poison gas. We were familiar with such things. It had happened before and certainly would happen again.

A useless refrigerator saved my life.

A second miracle, or possibly just another accident. Who can say about things like this?

It was afternoon—but what day I could not tell—when I came out of the refrigerator to pee among the dead in the street in front of my old school. I say
old
because it certainly was not going to be a school after this. There was nobody left to learn anything.

“Hey there. Where did you come from?”

I spun around to see who'd asked the question. I hadn't finished, so I found myself peeing in the direction of a pair of uniformed Republican Army soldiers carrying rifles. They'd been walking, searching house to house along the street toward the school. The men wore gas masks over their faces, so I could not tell which of them had called to me.

“I came from a refrigerator,” I said.

“How long have you been outside here?”

“Not even long enough to pee.”

They stood there, watching me as I buttoned up the front of my clown pants.

The soldier on the right turned to his partner and said, “It's a miracle this little boy survived.”

“I thought so, too,” I said, choosing not to argue about such things as accidents and divinity.

“Why are you dressed like that?”

“We were having a play.” I nodded at the school. “In there. Someone stole my clothes and I had to stay like this. And why are
you
dressed like
that
?”

I pointed up and down, at the men's uniforms.

“You're a funny clown.”

I shrugged. “I do my best.”

I turned as if to leave. “I need to go to my uncle's house.”

“Where? In the village? Here?”

I nodded.

The soldier shook his head. “There's nobody left, boy. Just you. You're a damned lucky clown.”

“Pierrot.”

The man on the right pulled the mask from his face and wiped the back of a shirtsleeve across his eyes. “I suppose if you can breathe, we might take these damn things off now.”

“The kid's a little canary,” the second soldier said.

“Was there any food inside your refrigerator?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

I tried to read his face, but there was nothing there. Only whiskers and sweat. He looked as though he hadn't shaved or slept in days. People commonly had that look in those days—in my first life, Max.

“Yes.”

“Maybe you should come with us. There's nothing left here, anyway. You don't want to stay here now, clown-boy.”

“My name is Ariel,” I said.

- - -

Jacob and Natalie Burgess
—my American parents—drove me and Max—my American brother—all the way from Sunday, West Virginia, just so that I could see New York City.

They did it only two days after I arrived in the United States.

It is hard to explain the strangeness of my experience. In a matter of days, I had been taken from the filthy squalor of a refugee camp, and then escorted to America aboard a military aircraft by a man named Major Knott, to the Burgesses' home in a sauerkraut-eating and rifle-admiring hamlet in West Virginia. And then I was whisked away in an automobile with a satellite navigation system for an eight-hour ride so I could gawk in awe at the towers to the sky of New York.

Alex, our crow, came, too. He stayed inside a small plastic crate—the kind you'd keep a dog in—stowed in the cargo area of the Volvo. Alex did little more than stare and stare. The first time I saw him, I thought he was a taxidermist's model.

On occasion, Alex would say awful things.

From his dog crate, he said, “I want to die.”

It was one of the strange side effects of Jake Burgess's early work with de-extinction and chipping animals: The resurrected species generally was less than enthusiastic about their sequel-return to the here and now, and the chipped animals—animals that were surgically implanted with mechanical surveillance devices—often manifested extreme psychoses. Alex, our crow, did a bit of both.

Alex stayed in the car while we walked toward the river that looked across to the state of New Jersey. Natalie left a plate of spaghetti inside the crate for Alex to eat.

At the water's edge, Father—his name was Jake Burgess—said, “This is what I wanted you to see, Ariel.”

And Father waved his arm out across the water as though he had created everything before my eyes, to direct my attention to an enormous welcoming mannequin that rose from the sea.

It was a strange thing to look at. Of course I had seen photographs of the thing before, but standing here at the edge of the continent, the thing struck me as being threatening—a type of warning. After all, the giant blue woman had sharp horns growing from her head and was holding a burning stick, the way you would hold fire to frighten ravenous predators away from you in the dark.

If I owned a house and wanted to keep myself safe from robbers, I would have someone who looked exactly like the great welcoming mannequin watching my door.

Max said, “I'm hungry.”

Mother offered, “There's spaghetti in the car.”

“I don't like spaghetti,” Max said.

Max was a finicky eater ever since his summer at fat camp.

Father took us to a sandwich place for lunch. Mother's purse was stolen while we ate.

She said, “Oh dear. Our car keys were in there.”

Father's car was towed to an impound lot, and we were stranded in New York City for two days.

T
HURSDAY
, F
EBR
UARY
12, 1880—
A
LEX
C
ROW

There is something morbidly fascinating in our predicament, wouldn't you agree? To imagine the probability of our present situation was impossible. Think about it—we have created our own island, as it were; our own kingdom, phylum, and class of men who hurled themselves arrogantly against the world and became trapped like flies in pine sap. And yet with each short day and interminable night the men put themselves back out onto the ice, never flagging in their effort to control our fate.

Our last contact with humanity came with our stocking of provisions and fuel at St. Lawrence Bay on 27 August, 1879. The
Alex Crow
became trapped in the ice pack only two weeks later. Captain Hansen maintained a strict and disciplined routine, taking constant measurements while the ice continued to drag our ship farther north toward his desired objective, the North Pole. In November, our expedition discovered a true island, which Captain Hansen claimed for the United States and named Alex Crow Island. It was with much bitterness that we watched that piece of land recede away from us and disappear from view as our other, icebound island of
Alex Crow
pulled us tediously onward.

We forge ahead, if nothing else, simply for the sake of doing.

The condition of Mr. Warren's hand is worsening.

It may be selfish of me (and this is very likely a confession of sorts—for is selfishness not the truest component of survival?), but having a patient to occupy my thoughts during the endless monotony aboard ship proves to be an acceptable diversion, unfortunate as it may be for the newspaperman.

I am afraid that given our circumstances I may soon become overwhelmed by such selfish diversions. Our provisions cannot last. Eventually, we will all succumb to the ice. After the last hunt on the pack ice, the native drivers of the dog teams threatened to abandon us and make an attempt for Saint Michael, their home.

Now Captain Hansen has armed guards watching the native men and their dogs. He has instructed the guards to shoot them if the dog drivers attempt to leave. The situation grows worse with each passing day.

This afternoon, an inspection revealed stresses on two of the hull's reinforcing beams. Before departing San Francisco, the
Alex Crow
had been refitted with new boilers and massive crossbeams below decks in order to withstand the tests anticipated on the journey.

Nobody could rightfully foresee our five-month imprisonment.

Today, while I was rewrapping Mr. Warren's crushed hand, Murdoch said to me that he had been his entire life at sea, but had never endured such a predicament as the one we find ourselves in at this moment.

“The ship will be eaten by the sea,” he said. “I know the ship will break apart, and we will all of us be buried in ice.”

F
RIDAY
, F
EBRUARY
13, 1880—
A
LEX
C
ROW

The hull of the
Alex Crow
gave in last night.

Murdoch came up from below and woke me by pounding on my cabin's door.

“Doctor! Doctor!” he cried.

At first I believed there was some kind of medical emergency that required my attention, but the commotion of men as they scrambled to remove whatever could be taken from the
Crow
and off-loaded onto the ice that trapped us here confirmed my worst fears.

The
Alex Crow
is sinking.

- - -

It was when he was eighteen
—a legal adult in the Land of Nonsense—that Leonard Fountain answered an advertisement to participate in a paid study by a company called Merrie-Seymour Research Group. Leonard Fountain didn't really understand or care about the aim of the study, because a thousand dollars was a lot of money to an eighteen-year-old kid from Idaho.

Unfortunately for Leonard Fountain, the study—which was the first round of such experiments involving the implantation of audio-video feed tissue-based “chips”—was directly linked to schizophrenic hallucinations among the majority of the participants. Merrie-Seymour Research Group decided to go back to the drawing board on newer generations of non-schizophrenia-inducing biochips.

Larry was the only inhabitant of Jupiter
who'd slept much on that first night.

But since the incident with Bucky Littlejohn and the field-point arrow through the foot, Larry was more than a little stressed out by the four boys of Jupiter. He looked as though he might toss and turn in his non-plastic bed.

After they packed up Bucky in an ambulance, Larry gathered us together and said, “I'm calling a cabin meeting. And right now.”

Max and I learned at “orientation,” an absolutely senseless meeting where we filled out the name tags we were required to stick to our chests at all times and counted out our socks and underwear and toured the dreaded lightless, spider-infested communal toilets and showers, that at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, “cabin meeting” times were usually reserved for group sessions with the camp's therapist, a frazzled old woman named Mrs. Nussbaum. During our six weeks, Mrs. Nussbaum ultimately came to the conclusion that at least three of the Jupiter boys were particularly troubled, and trouble for her—I never answered her personal questions, while Cobie Petersen and Max seemed to not fit in with the other planets of campers.

She happened to be waiting inside Jupiter when Larry marched the four of us in for our scolding about suicide attempts and such.

Our first session went something like this:

We sat on our beds while Mrs. Nussbaum eyed each one of us, almost as though she were trying to decide which unattractive and mangy puppy to save from the euthanizing chamber at a dog pound. Ultimately, I got that all wrong. Mrs. Nussbaum had other intentions as far as the fate of her boys was concerned.

Mrs. Nussbaum touched the tip of her index finger to my name tag. It made me flinch, and wonder, as all boys do at times like these, why did I always have to go first?

My name tag said this:

HELLO! MY NAME IS:
Ariel Burgess

I COME FROM:
Jupiter

Mrs. Nussbaum said, “
Ariel
. That's a lovely name. Would you care to tell us all something about yourself, Ariel?”

I looked directly at her and shook my head.

And since Mrs. Nussbaum brought it up, let me add something about my unwillingness to talk.

It wasn't that I felt embarrassed speaking English. I was confident in my ability with the language. The truth is this: I did not speak because I was unhappy and I was afraid. I was sorry for where I came from, and for what happened to so many of my friends and family members. I was sad to be an orphan—worse, a sole survivor—even if the Burgesses did graciously make me their awkward second son, Max's non-twinned twin. And it made me feel terrible how much Max hated me, too.

I didn't talk because I wouldn't tell anyone about what happened to me with the orphans in the tent city. But most of all was the feeling that I didn't belong here, as much as everyone had seemed so intent (and self-satisfied) with the notion of “saving” Ariel; and that I would never come to understand all of the nonsense that America presented to me.

That's why the boy from the refrigerator didn't say much.

So when Mrs. Nussbaum asked me if I would care to talk about myself, what would she expect me to say? I would love to
care
about talking about myself, but I did not.

So I said this, as politely as I could:

“No thank you.”

Mrs. Nussbaum looked injured.

It was a silly thing. Why would anyone ask a question to someone who has free will and then be surprised—or disappointed—by their answer? This made no sense. She asked, I answered, and then there came an awkward, silent, staring period that lasted for several minutes before Max contributed an opinion.

“Allow me to break the ice,” he said. “Ariel just doesn't like to talk.”

Besides, Mrs. Nussbaum mispronounced my name—she called me
Air-
iel—which is how most Americans said it. Max corrected her, saying
Ah-
riel.

It almost felt as though he were sticking up for me—something brothers should do, right?—but then Max added, “He's stupid, besides.”

So Mrs. Nussbaum asked Max to talk about his anger, and again seemed surprised by Max's response that he A) remembered Mrs. Nussbaum from when this was a fat camp, and he had never been fat in his life; and B) couldn't give a shit about Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

Apparently, Max still held on to his celery grudge from two years earlier.

“This used to be a
fat camp
?” Cobie said.

Max said, “It still
is
a fat camp. They switch it every six weeks between fat camp and the eighteenth century. When I was thirteen, my parents got me in during a fat camp cycle. It was the shittiest summer of my life. Even worse than now.”

Mrs. Nussbaum smiled broadly. “But of course I remember you now, Max!”

And then Cobie Petersen asked Mrs. Nussbaum, “How does it feel having the only vagina here in this entire camp?”

Mrs. Nussbaum reddened.

She stuttered, “I . . . I . . .”

When she regained her composure, Mrs. Nussbaum reminded the boys of Jupiter that this session was
not
about her, but if we felt like we wanted to talk about vaginas, she thought that it could be a healthy thing for boys our age.

I glanced over at Larry when Mrs. Nussbaum mentioned a possible vagina-talk. He looked sick.

Then Mrs. Nussbaum patted Robin Sexton on the knee and said, “Robin? I have a cousin named Robin. His parents named him after the little boy in
Winnie-the-Pooh
. How about you? Perhaps you'd like to begin by telling us how you feel about being here, or maybe you could say something about home, since the other boys seem to want to shut this experience out. You know, build walls around themselves.”

When she said
build walls
, Mrs. Nussbaum pressed her flattened palms in the air in front of her face, as though she were acting out a street mime's performance of “Man Trapped in an Invisible Box.”

And Robin said, “Huh?”

“He keeps shit in his ears, ma'am,” Cobie Petersen pointed out.

“Oh,” Mrs. Nussbaum said.

Then Mrs. Nussbaum asked us if we felt guilty or sad about what happened to Bucky Littlejohn that day on the archery field.

We all shook our heads, and Cobie said, “He pissed in his bed last night, and Larry made us all clean it up. He was bound to get shot sooner or later.”

Mrs. Nussbaum looked approvingly at Larry and told us, “You boys are off to a great start, I can tell! That's a very nice way to build a team.”

I suppose team-building in America depends on getting someone else's pee on your hands.

That day, Mrs. Nussbaum passed out blank index cards and gave us pencils. The pencils were the small kind you'd get inside box games, like Yahtzee. The Burgesses played Yahtzee every Saturday night. Max hated the game. He told me it was the only game he knew of where it was impossible to cheat, plus you had to do math. Both of these features made the whole thing not fun to Max.

The pencils Mrs. Nussbaum gave us had no erasers, which implied to me a prohibition on making mistakes. I noticed how Cobie Petersen rubbed the pad of his thumb on his pencil's point. I was reasonably certain he was estimating things like sharpness and stabbing potential.

My pencil had teeth marks in it.

And Mrs. Nussbaum instructed: “I want each of you to write on your cards. I want you to write about where you would
most rather be
, if you couldn't be here right now at Camp Merrie-Seymour with your friends.”

We all looked around at our cabin mates.

Friends?

“Come on, boys! You can do it!” Mrs. Nussbaum prodded, raising the pitch of her voice about one-half octave above “drunkenly enthusiastic,” and just below the sound baby dolphins make.

“Do we put our names on them?” Max asked.

“Oh, heavens no! These are only for you. They are
personal
.”

“Do we have to write in complete sentences?” Max said.

Mrs. Nussbaum frowned and shook her head.

When we finished (and I had no idea what any of the other boys wrote), Mrs. Nussbaum told us to fold our cards in half and tuck them under our pillows. Of course, when we did that, it sounded like a beer-can-crushing party. She told us we could revise our answers anytime we wanted to over the next six weeks, and that maybe we would all be able to see changes in ourselves by the time we had to go back home.

I didn't get what Mrs. Nussbaum meant by revising our answers. No matter what I did for the next six weeks, if I unfolded my index card and looked at it again, it was still going to say the same thing. Who didn't know that?

And Bucky Littlejohn saw plenty of change in himself in his less-than-twenty-four hours at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. He saw a hole through his left foot, and at that moment was undergoing surgery somewhere.

This is what I wrote on my index card:

INSIDE A REFRIGERATOR

It was not a very productive first group-therapy session, I think.

After Mrs. Nussbaum left, we all stood and attempted to make our way out of the cabin, but Larry stopped us. While Mrs. Nussbaum was relatively controllable as far as the manipulative and uncooperative puppies of Jupiter were concerned, Larry was another challenge altogether.

I'm pretty sure all of us were afraid of him.

“You're not going anywhere, fuckheads.” He said, “Now sit down.”

So each of us sat at the foot of his bed, and faced across the cabin at Larry.

“Let's get something straight right now,” he said. “I'm in charge of you guys for the next six weeks. You haven't even been here one day, and already one of you dickwads almost died. If I lose my job because of shit like this, they'll send me home and my dad will kick me out of the house, or make me get a
real
job and pay rent and shit.”

Cobie Petersen raised his hand, like a kid in a classroom.

Larry was clearly irritated. “What?”

Cobie said, “How old are you, Larry?”

Larry glared at Cobie. I realized then that Cobie Petersen was very good at testing people's resilience.

“Twenty-two. Why?”

Cobie shrugged. “Just wondering. Maybe you
should
get a real job.”

Larry clenched his teeth and inhaled deeply.

“Six weeks. Is that too much to ask? Come on, guys; give me a break. Then you can all go back home to your internet porn and video games while I get a new batch of losers who will never touch real girls in their lives.”

Cobie raised his hand again. “You must get lonely here, Larry.”

“Don't fuck with me, kid.”

Then Larry pointed at Max and said, “You. Arsonist. No more shit about burning down the cabin. Okay?”

Max nodded. “I was only joking. Besides, if Jupiter
does
burn down, they'll probably stick us in Uranus.”

Everyone except Larry laughed. Even Robin Sexton, who obviously had a selective filter for the things he'd allow to pass beyond his toilet-paper gates.

Larry's finger aimed at Robin. “And you. Jerkoff. There's no wanking allowed in this cabin. You think I didn't hear you last night?”

Robin twitched his fingers and said, “Huh?”

Then Larry pointed at me, “And you. Marcel Marceau.”

Well, at least I wasn't first. But I did look down at my bare knees to confirm I was wearing short pants, and not the Pierrot costume, which may have saved my life in another time.

I waited, but Larry didn't have any warning for me. All he said was this: “You just keep shutting up and we'll be totally okay with each other, dude, as long as you don't kill yourself.”

Then Larry stood up and looked at his wristwatch.

“Now get outside and look at that big yellow thing in the sky. It's called
the sun
. You have thirty minutes till lunch.”

And that was our first cabin meeting.

One of the inventions my American father came up with—this was years before I arrived in America—was a device that helped him sleep better at night.

The problem with Jake Burgess's sleep patterns had nothing to do with him. My mother, Natalie, snores terribly. I sleep downstairs from them, and even with my door closed I can hear her nightly snores. I can imagine a similar sound being produced by a giant tree stump being dragged by a tractor down a rough asphalt roadway.

When Max was only two years old, Jake Burgess went to work on what he called a
snore wall
. The device was rather small—about the size of a deck of playing cards—so it could stay on the mattress between Jake and Natalie. When activated, the snore wall emitted a pulse of electric-charged microwaves that rigidly locked the molecules in the air above it in a perfect line, so they could not be agitated by sound waves.

Natalie could snore like a sumo wrestler on her side of the snore wall, but Jake wouldn't hear a thing.

Jake Burgess was very, very smart.

Unfortunately, the first successful time Jake used his snore wall, two passenger jetliners crashed when they collided with the barrier in the skies over their house in Sunday.

Jake never used the snore wall again, but the Merrie-Seymour Research Group paid Jake an awful lot of money for the device.

That was the kind of research Jake Burgess was good at.

Too bad for all those people in the planes, but progress, you know, marches onward and will eventually trample anyone sleeping in its path.

Jake invented all kinds of crackpot things for the Merrie-Seymour Research Group. Max warned me about them. Sometimes I wasn't sure if Max was actually making the things up in his head just to scare me.

That's where Alex, our crow, came from.

It's another story entirely.