First published in the USA in 2015 by Dutton Books

a division of the Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

First published in Great Britain in 2015

by Electric Monkey – an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2015 Andrew Smith

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2015

ISBN 978 1 4052 7342 8

eISBN 978 1 7803 1622 2

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

For Chiara Luciana Smith, my beautiful daughter, who went with me to see the great welcoming mannequin that rises from the water.

THE ALEX CROW

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Here Is a Pinwheel

We Five Boys of Jupiter

The Great Welcoming Mannequin

Mrs Nussbaum, Larry, and the Snore Wall

This Is What We Do at Camp

Scary Stories

Marshmallow Jeff and the Boys from Earth

Demikhov’s Dogs and the Alex Cat

Teacher’s Pet and the Dumpling Man

Francis MacInnes in the Cemetery

So Much for Good Luck!

This Is Probably Why You Don’t Wake Up Sleepwalkers

Sock Puppet Jesus

Red Mercury and Bottled Water

Male Extinction

You Never Know

Crystal Lutz and Igor Zelinsky

The Yoke of Inauspicious Stars

Suck It Up, Iceman

All in the Name of Research, Ariel

Coffee for God

The Vernacular of Max

The Strange Case of Dr Alexander Merrie’s Siberian Ice Man

The Caboose of Natural Selection

SIM

The Book of Max and Cobie

I’m Still the Same Old Guy I’ve Always Been

A Little Game of Stones in a Grid

The Cat and the Mice

Fox in the Snow

Boys in the Woods

Major Knott

The Best Thing To Do with Ariel

Happy Birthday to Me

Something More Like Fondue

Out for a Walk While Our Porridge Cools

Up in the Woods a Way Up There!

American Airspace

Bringing Your Flag Back Home

The Melting Man and the Beaver King

Our Last Day in Jupiter

Sunday in Sunday

Max and His Brother

Epilogue: Mason-Dixon-Brand Sauerkraut

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PROLOGUE: HERE IS A PINWHEEL

“Here, kitty-kitty.”

The cat had a name—Alex—but General Parviz always called him in the same generic manner.

General Parviz, all gilded epaulets and clinking medals, a breathing propaganda poster, repeated, cooing, “Here, kitty-kitty.”

The Alex cat, a six-toed Manx, an official gift from the Hemingway estate and the people of the United States of America, swept its head from side to side, walking slow like a drowsy lion. The cat paused at the general’s slippered feet as though considering whether or not it actually wanted to jump up into General Parviz’s lap.

The general patted his thigh softly, beckoning.

“Kitty-kitty.”

The cat leapt soundlessly.

Then cat, general, palace, bodyguards, and approximately one-third the territory of the capital city blew up.

Here, kitty-kitty.

- - -

Here is a handful of dirt.

As far as its use as a medium for sustaining life—nourishing roots—it is perhaps the least capable dirt that can be found anywhere on the planet. To call it sand would be to give it some unwarranted windswept and oceanic dignity.

It is simply dead dirt, and it fills my hand.

I will tell you everything, Max, and we will carry these stories on our small shoulders.

On my fourteenth birthday, Marden and I played outside the village in one of Mr Antonio’s fields with Sahar, Marden’s sister. We would have been in trouble if we had been discovered. There was a funeral that day for Mr Antonio’s cousin who had been killed fighting against the rebels, so it was expected that everyone attend.

At school that morning, we performed a play. I had the role of Pierrot, Sahar my Columbine. One of the boys in our class played a joke on me: At the end of the day when we went to change out of our costumes to prepare for the funeral, somebody had taken all my clothes—everything—so I had to stay dressed as the mute white clown. I didn’t mind so much; the costume was loose and soft and made me feel disconnected, like a ghost drifting above the dead fields we played in.

“This is Mr Barbar’s ram,” Marden said.

Mr Barbar’s ram had been missing for more than a week.

Sahar and I grabbed small handfuls of dirt. We poured our dirt into the eye sockets on the rotting skull. What else would kids do? Playing with dirt and horned carcasses was a good way to have fun.

The thing looked like a caricature of the devil himself.

When the FDJA came to the village that day—it was just after the mourners arrived back from the funeral—four of them took all the boys and made us go up to the third floor of the school building. I was still dressed as Pierrot; nobody would confess as to who the thief of Ariel’s clothing was.

Of course, we all knew what was going to happen next, once the rebels got us into the upstairs classroom. We could already hear gunfire and cries coming from outside the school.

The rebels bribed us with cigarettes and guns.

What boy doesn’t want cigarettes and a gun?

One of the men, his face hidden behind a red scarf, said to me, “What are you supposed to be?”

“Pierrot,” I answered.

He shook his head, confused.

“You look like a boy-whore.”

Ivan, a ten-year-old, puffed on his first cigarette and glared at me. I wanted to slap him. One of the FDJA men patted the boy’s head. We were all goners at this point.

Everyone knew. It had been this way all our lives. Here, the deliberate cruelty of violence was a matter of fact; controlling, constraining, and understandable. Not so much in some of my other stories, Max.

The rebels targeted the older boys, many of whom were approaching conscription age for the Republican Army. They taunted the boys with insults about patriotism and loyalty to capitalist puppet masters. One boy, Jean-Pierre, pissed himself when the man whose face was covered with the red snot-stiffened rag prodded his belly with a gun barrel. Naturally, this was very funny to the FDJA men. Who wouldn’t laugh at a sixteen-year-old boy who pissed his pants as he was about to be kidnapped by thugs with guns?

I felt bad for Jean-Pierre, who, like the other chosen boys in the schoolroom, recited a robotic pledge of allegiance to the FDJA. He would have done the same thing on his eighteenth birthday to the Republican Army, anyway. So, who cared?

We were all going to go with the FDJA now, or we would never leave this third-floor schoolroom. They promised us that we were old enough to make our way as men, even though some of the youngest boys were barely ten years old.

My friend Marden was sixteen.

When one of the men tried wrapping the red scarf of the FDJA around Marden’s neck, my friend swatted his hand away. Marden was always defiant like that—impulsive—and everyone knew it was a mistake. But what could we do?

To make an example of him to the other boys, two of the FDJA men picked up Marden by his feet and threw him headfirst out the window as he kicked and scratched at them. But Marden didn’t scream or cry. I heard the impact of his body against the paving stones that lined the street below.

I desperately wished I had my proper school clothes. I felt so isolated and noticeable in my thin white clown suit.

Two of my schoolmates ran for the doorway that led to the stairs. The man with the hidden face fired at them and they tumbled down in a heap across the threshold.

“Let’s go!” he said.

I could only see his eyes peering out from a slit on the covering. He waved his gun to goad the remaining boys—there were five of us—over our friends’ bodies and out the door.

One of the men videoed the slaughter in the schoolroom with his cell phone, sweeping it around and around until he focused directly on my face. Most of the white makeup I’d worn earlier had been wiped away, but I was still pale and painted. And I was crying. The video would be uploaded with the usual descriptions blaming all this on the Republican Army. People naturally believe things they see. Nobody argues with the irrefutable postings on YouTube.

I was told that in America, many people believed FDJA stood for Freedom Democracy Jesus Army.

They sent money.

I stood by the open window, thinking about Marden and how we’d been playing in Mr Antonio’s field just moments before. What could I do? I was frozen at the edge of the floor, with the fingers of one of my hands resting on the windowsill where my friend had left the room that smelled of sweat and gunpowder.

The man with the red mask, his eyes wild and white, turned toward me. The other boys made their way out into the hallway, tramping through blood. He raised his rifle. The barrel was so slender and short. I was as familiar with these guns as anything in the world—how they smelled, the sound of their report. When he pointed the thing at the center of my chest, I thought it would be a better end than to be thrown after Marden—but when the man pulled the trigger, the thing jammed—dead—and the two remaining FDJA men stared at me as though I were dead, as though the gun had functioned properly and I was done for—I believe they could not accept anything other than this—the wide white staring eyes of them, whiter than the soft clown suit that seemed to flutter around my body.

Then they left and I heard their footsteps clattering downstairs as the others ahead of them yelled at the boys and told them to form a line and get out onto the street.

Happy birthday to me.

Later, I thought, this was the first miracle I had seen. Perhaps my survival was nothing more than an accident. Accident, miracle—I suppose the storyteller retains the right to determine such things.

Picture this, Max: I waited in the classroom for a while, wondering if maybe I really was dead—that this is what being dead is, just a dream that continues on and on—and now I truly was the ghost I’d imagined myself to be when Sahar and Marden and I played that afternoon.

When I was certain the men and their new conscripts had gone, I went downstairs into the school’s kitchen and hid inside a walk-in refrigerator.

- - -

Here is nothing but ice.

It is more than ice, more than anyone on the steamer had ever seen. It is the blue-white fist of God, curling calloused fingers to grasp the protesting wooden hull. It is an infinity field of jaws with countless rows of teeth; absolute control and the concurrent absence of control. The hungry ice creaks and moans, stretching forever to become horizon, ceiling, and cemetery; and the ship, frozen and moving, trapped in this relentless vise, is slowly dragged along, endlessly northwest into more and more ice.

Tuesday, February 10, 1880 — Alex Crow

Today is our fifth month in the ice. The ship is held fast. The readings calculated by Mr Piedmont, ship’s navigator, measure the distance the ice has taken us at more than one hundred miles!

It is the cruel reversal of our intent. The men of the Alex Crow expedition set off with the expectation that it would be us—the first voyagers here to absolute north—who might inflict our will upon the planet; instead we face the grim truth that nature’s will is uncontestable.

I keep such daily accounts as no measure of optimistic entertainment. My overwhelming sense is that the end of our story will not be written by my hand.

I don’t think I can endure this imprisonment much longer; I am beginning to wonder if I’ll go as insane as Murdoch.

After breakfast, a party of seven men took a team of dogs and one of the sleds out onto the pack to hunt for seal and bear. I stood at the rail and watched in amazement as the men and dogs clambered over the unyielding hummocks of ice that had once been the ocean.

Twenty-five of us remained behind on the Alex Crow, including the newspaperman, Mr Warren, who had crushed his hand three days ago between the ice and forefoot of the hull and is currently under my care. Today, the majority of the men busy themselves with the drudgery of routine maintenance.

Some watch and record wildlife sightings. Wildlife!

In the afternoon we heard rifle fire but could not determine its direction due to the blinding whiteness that smothered everything.

It was then that Murdoch, who has taken to following me around, said, “Doctor, Doctor, I do believe our men have found something.”

- - -

Here we see a two-quart jar of Mason-Dixon-brand sauerkraut.

I believe sauerkraut, along with guns, is some type of national symbol in the Land of Nonsense. Everyone in Sunday, West Virginia, eats sauerkraut and also shoots things. So it isn’t a casual act by which I begin a story with the examination of a jar of sauerkraut—the sauerkraut has a purpose; it shapes one of my clearest initial memories since coming to America, as though when the contents of that particular two-quart jar of Mason-Dixon-brand sauerkraut spilled, something began to fill me up after all my emptying and emptying.

I arrived here in Sunday little more than one week after my fifteenth birthday.

A year had passed since the miracle in the schoolhouse.

Happy birthday to me, once again.

Mother—my American mother, Natalie Burgess—has the most confusing habit of making everything seem insignificant and small. My brother Max calls her the Incredible Shrinking Machine.

Here is what happened: When the top jar tumbled from its eye-level placement, it caught the edge of the metal cage basket on the shopping cart and exploded in a fetid shower of cabbage and knife-shards of glass.

Mother was dressed in salmon-colored shorts and pale yellow sandals.

One of the glass shards slashed across her leg, mid-calf.

She said, “Oh.”

I had only been here four days, but the way she said it sounded like an apology to me, as though it were her fault for being in that precise spot inside the Sunday Walk-In Grocery Store at the exact moment the jar slipped from the shelf.

We had dropped Max off at school earlier. I was not enrolled yet, because the officials at William E. Shuck High School insisted on testing and testing me to determine whether or not I was an idiot, or could speak English, which I could do perfectly well despite my aversion to talking.

“Oh,” Mother said again.

I shifted my weight from foot to foot. I didn’t have any idea what I was supposed to do. Maybe I was an idiot of some kind. But here I was in this grocery store, which may just as well have been some gleaming palace or gilded mosque, watching in confused silence while Mother bled all over the speckled linoleum floor.

It was a nauseating scene; so much so that I vomited, which made everything just that much more repulsive, and Mother said “Oh” again because we were making such a mess on aisle number seven.

Mother reached into her purse and gave me a handkerchief so I could wipe my face. The handkerchief smelled like perfume and mint chewing gum. Then she pressed some wadded napkins into the cut on her leg.

A clerk wearing a brown apron came running up the aisle toward us. I thought he was mad because of all the mess we’d made, but he was most concerned about the injury to Mother’s leg.

“We’re calling an ambulance!” he said. “Please sit down!”

And he flailed his arms as though he were swimming toward us.

But Mother said, “No. No. I’ll be fine! I’m so sorry for all this.”

And while the man pleaded with her, bent forward so she could press her soaked napkins against the wound, she grabbed my clammy hand in hers and led me out to the car.

“I’m sorry. This is so embarrassing, Ariel,” she said as we climbed in.

We did not make it home. Mother passed out behind the wheel less than a mile from the Sunday Walk-In Grocery, due to all the blood she’d lost.

She was like that.

- - -

Here is Joseph Stalin telling the melting man what he had to do.

Joseph Stalin’s voice came from the air vents on the dashboard of the melting man’s recycled U-Haul moving van. Joseph Stalin also spoke to the melting man through the radio.

The melting man tried to do anything he could to make Joseph Stalin shut up.

He removed the radio at a rest stop near Amarillo, Texas, and left it dangling wires atop the hand dryer in the men’s toilet, but Joseph Stalin’s voice still came through the old speakers.

At the same time Leonard Fountain—the melting man—crossed the border between Oklahoma and Arkansas, Joseph Stalin told him this: “They are coming to get you, Leonard. You know that. You must not let them catch you.”

Leonard Fountain drove his recycled U-Haul truck all the way from Mexico City, where he’d assembled the biggest bomb he’d ever seen at a rented flat on the top floor of an apartment house across the street from one of the sixteen Holiday Inns in the city.

Leonard Fountain believed he had to stop the Beaver King. The Beaver King was hiding somewhere near a shopping mall called Little America. He knew that, because Joseph Stalin told him all about the Beaver King. The Little America Mall had an animated Statue of Liberty in the center of its welcoming gates. The statue could spin its crowned head around in a full circle, and its torch-bearing arm could lower and flash colorful beams of lights at the dazzled shoppers.

No doubt, had the French been more technologically advanced, the original Statue of Liberty would perform the exact same tricks.

Leonard Fountain had a fascination with bombs. He grew up in Idaho, where kids were naturally expected to blow things up.

What else would you do?

When he was thirteen years old, although he spent the majority of his waking hours playing video games or masturbating, Leonard Fountain helped out his neighbors by blowing up beaver dams.

On his fifteenth birthday, Leonard Fountain, who hadn’t started melting yet, made a remote-controlled bomb from three sticks of dynamite and lashed it to the neck of a dairy cow.

They never found the cow’s head.

Leonard Fountain loved blowing things up.

“They are coming for you, Leonard,” Joseph Stalin said. “There is a drone flying directly above our truck. You can see it. When you look at it, it will disappear.”

Outside Arkadelphia, the melting man pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the highway. He knew what to do. He pretended to be distracted, and then looked up into the sky behind the rear gate on the U-Haul.

Leonard Fountain saw something in the sky.

What he saw was a perfect rectangular prism that hovered soundlessly, fifty feet above his head. The thing was metallic and shiny, about four feet long, and as soon as the melting man focused on it, the thing rotated diagonally and vanished—became invisible.

They were watching Leonard Fountain. Leonard Fountain knew it all along.

From time to time, when he’d get out of the van to pee or sometimes vomit alongside the road, the melting man would suddenly jerk his head around and glance up into the sky, and the little floating box—it resembled a package of tinfoil—would always be there, and then it would turn slightly and disappear.

And it was while the melting man drove through Arkansas, in the direction of Tennessee, that Joseph Stalin became particularly nasty.

“Look at you,” Joseph Stalin scolded. “You’re disgusting. You better get this done before you dissolve into a puddle of pus and goo. Now pay attention.”

Leonard Fountain did not want to pay attention. He drove with an old Hohner Special 20 harmonica in his mouth, and he’d blow the loudest noise through it every time Joseph Stalin said anything about what he wanted the melting man to do. But the harmonica didn’t work. So Leonard Fountain bought two spring-winding kitchen timers at a drugstore and he taped them over his ears with medical gauze, hoping the metallic tick-tick-ticking of them would stop the Communist dictator’s voice.

He thought Joseph Stalin’s voice must have been beamed into his head from a government satellite. What other explanation could there be?

Actually, there was another explanation, but Leonard Fountain never figured it out.

Leonard Fountain was insane and melting, and he needed to blow something up.

- - -

Here we see the family pet—a crow we call Alex.

The bird is named after a barkentine steamer commissioned by the U.S. Navy in the late nineteenth century. The ship became icebound—trapped—during an expedition to discover a fabled open seaway to the North Pole in 1879.

Alex is a product of my American father’s research.

I don’t think the research turned out very well for Alex.

What my father does, I believe, is less research, and perhaps more appropriately called “aimless scientific wandering.”

And he finds things you’d never know were out there.

Alex is a morbid being, obsessed with his own death, and gruesomely despondent. I know that’s an odd set of qualities for a bird, but Alex should not have been saved to begin with. He is a member of a species that has been extinct for more than a century, and I think all Alex really wants to do is go back to where he’d been pulled from.

My father, and the company he works for, are tireless in their obsession with saving things from nonexistence, and by doing so, controlling the course of life itself. Unfortunately, sometimes paths and directions can’t be so easily controlled, as the men on the ill-fated steamer Alex Crow found out. And sometimes things don’t want to be saved or brought back from where they’d been trapped.

WE FIVE BOYS OF JUPITER

It came as no surprise that our interplanetary archery competition was canceled the day Bucky Littlejohn shot himself through the foot with a field point arrow.

What was surprising, Max—my American brother—told me, was this: No kid before Bucky Littlejohn had ever been cunning enough to devise such a foolproof plan for getting out of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Max said.

Probably because Max was not as self-destructive or desperate as Bucky Littlejohn, I thought.

It was also surprising that Bucky Littlejohn did not cry or scream at all as the arrow drilled through his foot all the way to the plastic yellow feathers of the shaft’s fletching. It mounted Bucky Littlejohn like an insect pinned for display to a spreading board, tacking the boy to the soft ground of the lakeside field. And Bucky, transformed into a silent, human version of a draftsman’s compass, spun around and around a bloody pinpoint in his sea-foam green plastic clogs, while he stamped out an impeccable circle with his free right foot.

So there was an empty bunk that night in the Jupiter cabin of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, where Max and I slept with a reduced-to-two additional bunk mates and Larry, our counselor.

If only the archery contest depended on our team’s willingness to inflict self-injury, we would have beaten the unbloodied boys from the Neptune, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Pluto cabins.

There was no populated Earth cabin at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, and the camp’s directors had decided to shut down and abandon the Venus and Uranus cabins as well. Those planets came with too much psychological baggage for teenage boys.

The night before—our first night at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys—I felt certain that some terrible mistake had been made. Lying in my dingy bed, in a damp room that smelled of urine and sweat, I couldn’t sleep at all due to the incessant rustling of bedding, and one of our roommates’ depraved sobbing that never slackened in the least.

I believed that Max and I had erroneously been committed to some sort of asylum for insane children.

This was America after all, and there was no shortage of insanity as far as I could see.

It was mid-June here in the George Washington National Forest. I had completed the final months of my ninth-grade year at William E. Shuck High School. That was when our parents sent Max and me off to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

They told us the experience was intended to get us to bond as loving brothers should. Max and I hadn’t made much progress along those lines.

Max, after all, did not like me. He told me as much during my first week with his family.

He’d said this: “Listen, dude, just because they took you in doesn’t mean I have to act like you’re my brother—because you’re not. You’re a stranger, just like anyone else I never knew.”

Yes, it was a mean thing for Max to say, but I also empathized with his feeling intruded upon.

And as usual, I didn’t say anything, so Max went on. “They’re nuts, anyway. She doesn’t know how to react to setbacks, and Christ knows, every time she turns around she’s getting kicked in the teeth. And he—he’s a freak.”

I shrugged.

And Max had told me, “He’s an inventor, you know, and he purposely creates things that destroy people’s lives. Like you, Ariel, only you’re not going to ruin my life, and neither will Mom or Dad.”

So I was convinced Max hated me. He probably had good cause. What fifteen-year-old boy (we were the same age) would welcome the halving of his world with a foreigner who didn’t like to talk?

I should explain that Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys was a sort of disciplinarian’s boot camp—a detox center for kids who were unable to disconnect from cell phones and technology. For boys like that, being outside or sleeping in smelly huts crowded with strangers—things I had plenty of experience with—was the same as eternal condemnation to hell. And Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys was not fun at all, which is exactly why Bucky Littlejohn shot himself in the foot.

You almost couldn’t blame him.

Neither Max nor I had a problem disconnecting from such things as technology and video games, and interacting with real human beings. The first time I’d even touched a cell phone happened after turning fifteen and coming to America.

The first time I’d used a cell phone was to call for help when Mother slumped unconscious from blood loss behind the wheel of her Volvo as we drove home from the sauerkraut store in Sunday.

I also found out later that Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys was free of charge to our parents. It was owned by the lab company our father works for, the Merrie-Seymour Research Group. Every six weeks, the camp alternated its focus between technological addiction and weight loss. Two summers before, during one of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys’ “fat camp” cycles, Max, who is awkwardly thin, was sent.

The summer he was thirteen, my brother Max lost fifteen pounds.

To this day, Max has nightmares that prominently feature celery.

The campers’ beds in Jupiter were arranged along one wall, packed so closely together that they were nearly impossible to make (something we were required to do every morning). We learned that we had to take turns navigating around our sheet-tucking duties. And the only reasonable way to get in or out of one of the beds without risking a fight or awkward bodily contact with another boy was from the foot of each one. Bucky Littlejohn’s cot sat empty along the back wall. After he left, which was on our second day—not twenty-four hours into the six-week journey to rediscover “the fun of boyhood” at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys—none of the campers in Jupiter wanted to claim the vacated bed by the wall; Bucky peed in it the first and only night he spent in Jupiter. Maybe he only attempted the bedwetting as an initial means for getting kicked out.

Bucky Littlejohn was no quitter.

The arrow-through-the-foot tactic was unarguably brilliant.

The boys of Camp Merrie-Seymour were desperate.

My sleeping spot sandwiched me between a kid Max and I had seen around William E. Shuck High School, Cobie Petersen, a pale-skinned, freckled sixteen-year-old who lived up Dumpling Run, a creek that was only about three miles from our home in Sunday; and a thirteen-year-old boy named Robin Sexton from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Robin twitched his thumbs constantly, as though he were handling an invisible video game controller, and he kept tight wads of toilet paper jammed into his ears because he said he couldn’t stand all the noise the world pushed into his head when he wasn’t wearing earbuds.

Of course, there were no earbuds—no electric-powered devices of any kind—permitted for the campers at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. In fact, every one of the thirty-three boys assigned to the six planets of the camp was closely inspected upon arrival. Each of us was obligated to bring perfectly matched camper kits: duffel bags, which contained precise numbers of T-shirts, shorts, toothbrushes, and changes of socks and underwear, in which, for reasons I could only speculate, we had to write our names with permanent marker.

They counted everything.

Max’s bed was closest to the door.

On our first night at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Max joked that he would be the lone survivor from Jupiter if our cabin burned down in the next six weeks, to which Larry, our counselor, warned, “Don’t get any ideas, fuckheads.”

And then Larry proceeded to strip-search all five of us. We even had to turn our socks inside out.

This may have pushed Bucky Littlejohn over the edge.

So we five boys of Jupiter, who would be four the following night, stood there in our underwear while Larry emptied the contents of our duffel bags and tore the covers and bedding from our cots, just to make certain none of us had smuggled in a cigarette lighter.

During the commotion, boys spilled out from the Saturn, Mercury, Mars, Neptune, and Pluto cabins. They taunted us from outside our screen windows. As long as the lights—kerosene lanterns, which were closely guarded by the counselors—were on in our solar system, everyone could see everything that happened in Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

The other planets chanted and clapped at us.

“Strip search! Strip search! Strip search!”

Larry left the place a complete mess, and we had to clean it up—in our underwear—while the planets outside observed (after all, it wasn’t as though they could divert themselves with television or video games) and our counselor watched suspiciously from his bed, which sat uncrowded and isolated on the opposite side of the cabin.

“Hurry up and straighten out your shit,” Larry said. “I want lights out in five minutes, and you’re all getting up at sunrise tomorrow morning. You’re going to have fun, fuckheads.”

I was fascinated by the word. One more of those American things that made no sense to me whatsoever, I thought. If they’d allowed me to bring my notebook along to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, I would have written a reminder to eventually research the etymology of fuckhead.

Still, I had no idea what to expect from Larry’s concept of “fun.” It had seemed to me that in just a few hours we had been through enough torment already. At dinner, they fed us something called “Beanie Weenie.” I had never heard of it before, but it was better than sauerkraut, so I ate it.

It made no sense.

Jupiter, an exact replica of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys’ other eight cabins (three of which were abandoned), was a strange and primitive design. To me, it most closely resembled an insect cage. The walls, which stood only about three feet high, were built with horizontal redwood slats. The entire upper two-thirds of them were nothing more than mesh screen all the way around, which is why the boys of the other cabins could watch us losers from Jupiter enact our dramatic failure in our underwear for their entertainment. Unless you were a counselor, who got to sleep in actual pajamas and had his own lighted-by-electricity toilet and shower facilities, there was no privacy anywhere in the camp. And we would eventually find out, too, just how miserable and damp it could be during a summer downpour.

Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had a motto, which was carved in a sort of rustic hewn-log font on the crossbar over the entry gate. It said this:

Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys

Where Boys Rediscover The Fun of Boyhood!

It almost made me nauseous—not just the word rediscover, which is a ridiculous word—all the boy, boy, boy on that sign. You could practically smell balls just by reading it. To be honest, the camp always did smell like balls, anyway.

Someone—no doubt a Merrie-Seymour success story who’d endured the camp before Max and I arrived—had taken the time to vandalize the crossbar by etching in two additional words: OR DIE.

Apparently, the internees at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had been encouraged to carve. This was something that we’d never be allowed to do. After Bucky Littlejohn’s archery performance, the counselors removed everything sharp from Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

There were all sorts of things carved into the walls around our cots. Two pieces in particular fascinated me. First, there was a kind of religious depiction of an Xbox controller that was nailed to a cross floating in the clouds, while tangles of skeleton-thin boys looked up at it from the apparent hell of Jupiter cabin. The second thing I admired was a short inscription—a mathematical equation for our cabin—that said LARRY = SATAN.

And there were plenty of names, too, and dates. The name nearest my pillow said ELI 1994. Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had been there for decades.

It was almost like sleeping in a graveyard.

So as I lay there that first night, trapped between the twitching kid with toilet-paper earplugs from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and Cobie Petersen—and while I listened to Bucky Littlejohn’s pathetic sobbing—I imagined what 1994 Eli was doing right at that moment.

Probably Facebooking, I thought.

Larry extinguished the lantern. There was no electricity in the cabins, naturally.

Our audience disbanded and journeyed back to their respective planets.

The mattresses on our cots were covered with thick plastic. It made sense, I suppose, but whenever any of the boys moved or shifted, our beds made sounds like someone was crumpling a soda can. After about five minutes, Cobie Petersen said to no one in particular, “I can’t take this shit.”

Larry said, “Shut up and go to sleep.”

Larry had a non-plastic mattress. Apparently, Larry could be counted on to not pee his bed, or do the other things some of the campers at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys inevitably did.

Max rolled onto his side—crumple crumple!—and put his pillow over his head.

Then Cobie shot up in bed and yelled, “What the fuck! The crying kid’s pissing!”

And we all heard the dribble of Bucky Littlejohn’s urine as it trickled down between the cots and puddled on the floor below us.

Larry said, “Jesus Christ!”

The lantern came back on.

And Larry ordered Bucky Littlejohn, who was steaming and stained in his drooping, piss-soaked underwear, and the rest of us, the four insomniacs with dry underwear, to go to the lavatory—a dark and scary combination toilet, insect sanctuary, and shower facility for the campers—and fetch a mop and pail.

On the way there, Cobie said, “If you weren’t covered in piss, kid, I’d kick the shit out of you.”

I wondered if Cobie Petersen really meant that, because if he actually did kick the shit out of Bucky Littlejohn, it would really be a mess we’d have to clean up.

It was a very long night.

THE GREAT WELCOMING MANNEQUIN

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.

Thursday, February 12, 1880 — Alex Crow

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.”

Friday, February 13, 1880 — Alex Crow

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.

MRS NUSSBAUM, LARRY, AND THE SNORE WALL

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.

THIS IS WHAT WE DO AT CAMP

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.

SCARY STORIES

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.”

Tuesday, February 17, 1880 — Alex Crow

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.

Sunday, February 22, 1880 — Alex Crow

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?

Why bother?

It was entirely unbelievable. When we saw the dark breach ahead of us, Captain Hansen and Mr Piedmont presumed we were approaching Kotelny Island, and that what we saw must have been the rocky shore. This proved to be incorrect as we neared the edge of the ice pack.

So it was with renewed spirit the men bothered to lower the heavy longboats into the sea. The dog teams, however, were forced to turn back in the direction from which they’d come, since there was not adequate room on our boats for everything. I sensed some great relief among the native handlers when they were finally free to leave our ill-fated expedition.

I am in Captain Hansen’s boat. I believe that his leadership has kept the majority of the expedition alive during the difficult journey across the ice, and I have faith that he will bring us safely to the shores of the northern islands where we will find shelter and warmth among the natives there.

This is my hope.

Tuesday, February 24, 1880 — Alex Crow

We lost sight of our sister boat in a vicious storm last night.

One more of the seamen—Richard Alan Culp—died aboard our vessel this afternoon. Once again, our diminished party feels alone and without hope. It is all I can do to tend to their aching bodies, and attempt to inspire some sense of confidence and optimism. I’m afraid this is entirely useless, though. The least I can do is to ignore the constant questioning of Murdoch.

This afternoon, Mr Warren and I huddled beneath the gunwale in a small covered space we’d made with one of the expedition’s tents. I’d asked him if he was still dictating the narrative of our expedition to Murdoch. He insisted that readers would want to have the full account of the loss of the Alex Crow, even if none of us survived.

“Particularly if none of us survive,” I said.

To this, Mr Warren replied, “I cannot think any of us will ever see his home again. Why would anyone think such a thing, given our current state?”

I do not believe we can last one more night in this boat. I have found myself hoping—and that is an odd word to use—that I will not wake to find myself the sole living inhabitant of the boat, that if I am not to make it home again, as Mr Murdoch predicts, that I die before too many others are dropped into the sea.

I realize that death and survival are both extremes of selfishness.

Just before nightfall, from beneath our covering, Mr Warren and I heard Murdoch shouting that land had been sighted, but when we came out to look, it was already too dark to see anything more than an arm’s reach from the boat’s hull.

Imagine our disappointment and dread at Captain Hansen’s cautious decision to forego any attempt at landing until daylight tomorrow.

“Who knows where we will be at daylight tomorrow?” Murdoch wondered.

MARSHMALLOW JEFF AND THE BOYS FROM EARTH

“I’m going to tell you guys something, but you are not allowed to ever repeat it to anyone else as long as you live.” Larry pointed his index finger like a spear to emphasize the words anyone else.

“That sounds perfectly reasonable, Larry,” Cobie Petersen said.

I wondered about Cobie Petersen. Like Max and me, Cobie Petersen just didn’t belong here; he didn’t fit in with the other kids at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. At that moment, after his smart-ass comment went unnoticed by Larry, I almost wanted to talk to him, to ask him why his parents sent him here, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Robin Sexton, on the other hand, was a different story. Of the four boys of Jupiter, he was clearly in the right place.

I watched Robin Sexton. His face was blank, and he stared into the fire with frozen eyes. His thumbs and fingers wriggled over an invisible controller. I was pretty sure he was hallucinating clearing a difficult level in some violent video game.

“I’m going to tell you what happened to Earth,” Larry said.

“Before or after the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs?” Cobie asked.

Robin Sexton rocked back and forth.

“No,” Larry said. “I’m going to tell you about the Earth cabin, and why we don’t use it anymore at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. And you fuckheads can’t say anything to anyone, because this is a true story. But you have to tell a scary story, too. It’s what normal kids do at camp, at night.”

Max and Cobie looked warily at Robin Sexton. Then they both promised they would tell a story.

Larry said, “What about you, Marcel Marceau? You in for telling us a story?”

I shook my head.

“You could just act it out,” Larry said.

I was acting it out. I shook my head again.

“Whatever,” Larry said. “Well, two of you is better than none. We already know Earbud’s scary story, about the time he got caught jerking off at camp. So here goes: I started working here as a counselor when I was seventeen—just out of high school. My dad wanted to make me join the army, or he said he was going to throw me out of the house when I turned eighteen, which was going to be in a month and a half, so I headed east and ended up answering an ad for a live-in counselor. In those days, there were three alternating programs here: a camp for fat kids; this one you guys are in—the camp for fuckheads like you who don’t have any real-life friends; and a camp for kids with psychological disorders, you know—neurotics, compulsive liars, narcissists, kleptomaniacs, sadists, and arsonists.”

It sounded like the future of America to me.

“Lucky thing I missed out on the Camp Merrie-Seymour for Psychopathic Boys cycle that summer,” Max said.

“Every day, you’d wake up and it was like Custer’s Last Stand,” Larry said.

“That’s slang for jerking off,” Max pointed out.

“It is?” Larry said,

Max nodded his assurance.

Larry went on, “The Earth cabin’s counselor was a guy named Marshmallow Jeff. The kids called him that because he was really, really white, and he’d use marshmallows as bribes to get the crazies to behave themselves. And he was super creepy, too. He kept marshmallows in his pockets for the kids, and tucked inside the tops of his socks, too. Nobody liked him, and he never talked to anyone.”

For some reason, this last statement caused Max and Cobie to turn and stare at me.

Then Larry said, “But the kids of Earth were like zombies under Marshmallow Jeff ’s control, on account of all the marshmallows he’d give them. The Earth cabin’s still here, too. It’s on the other side of the creek from the mess hall, in the woods. After the incident that happened there that summer, they stopped keeping the vines knocked back around Earth, so unless you know it’s there, you don’t even notice it.”

“So, what happened at the Earth cabin?” Max asked.

“I’m telling you, kid. Be patient.” Larry moistened his lips and burped a silent blast of vodka gas. “Pretty much as soon as the camp term started that summer, Marshmallow Jeff complained to Mrs Nussbaum that one of the other planets was playing tricks on the Earth boys—trying to scare them. He said that his kids kept seeing two red eyes in the woods at night, like they were staring in at them through the screen on the cabin. Nobody likes to get stared at by red eyes at night, right? Anyway, it kept happening, night after night, and the eyes kept getting closer and closer and closer to the Earth cabin.”

Larry lowered his voice and got a crazy look in his eyes when he said the part about the eyes getting closer. And I’ll be honest—I’d never heard stories like this before, so it was making me more than a little scared.

Then something happened that made us all jump.

We heard the fluttering buzz of a vibrating cell phone. Larry jerked his hand down to smother the spot in his cargo shorts where he’d hidden his phone, but it was too late. The thing may just as well have been an air-raid siren as far as the boys of Jupiter were concerned.

“Uh,” Larry said.

Robin Sexton’s eyes flashed flames.

“You have a phone!” Robin said.

“No—I—uh—”

In other circumstances, with other planets, I could easily imagine a bloody scene ending in Larry’s gruesome dismemberment. But clearly, Max, Cobie, and I didn’t care about Larry’s cell phone. Robin Sexton, on the other hand, began salivating and attempted to get to his feet.

But Larry held out a warning hand and said, “Don’t even think about it, kid.”

Robin chewed on his lower lip and sat back in the dirt.

It was reasonable that counselors would be permitted to have such luxuries as cell phones and electricity and so on. I could only assume that most of them were more adept than Larry at keeping their secrets concealed.

“Am I going to finish telling this story, or what?”

“If we had our phones, you could group text us,” Cobie Petersen offered.

Larry sighed, and put his hands on his knees like he was going to get up and go to bed.

“No. I was just kidding, Larry,” Cobie apologized. “Please finish the story.”

Larry pointed his spear-finger at Cobie. “You’re telling one, too.”

“I promised, didn’t I?”

So Larry continued, “One night there was a terrible storm. Everyone shut themselves up inside the cabins just trying to keep dry and warm, except for Marshmallow Jeff and the boys from Earth. They’d seen the red eyes in the woods again, right outside their cabin, and Marshmallow Jeff told his campers he’d give them all fistfuls of marshmallows if they would go out in the storm into the woods with him, so they could kick the living shit out of whoever was trying to scare them.”

“Were you in Jupiter then, Larry?” Cobie Petersen asked.

“Yeah.”

“Six summers in Jupiter.” Cobie shook his head. “You must be very, very lonely.”

“Shut up. It’s not like I spend all year here, kid. I have a life,” Larry said.

“Doing what, exactly?” Cobie asked.

“Jesus. Are you guys going to let me tell the story, or what?”

I think we all wondered what Larry did when he wasn’t in Jupiter.

“Sorry,” Cobie Petersen said. “I just find you endlessly fascinating, Larry.”

Larry’s jaw kind of hung open slightly, and he stared blankly at Cobie Petersen—probably the way one would look out at a pair of glowing red eyes in the middle of a creepy forest at night. When he regained his composure, Larry said, “We heard screams—the most horrible sound you could ever imagine—coming from deep in the woods that night. The whole camp was terrified, and when we looked, Earth cabin was completely empty. We searched and searched all the following day, but there was no sign at all of Marshmallow Jeff and the boys from Earth. It was like they had completely vanished into thin air.”

Max, Cobie, and I glanced at one another, trying to gauge by each other’s face whether or not we should believe Larry’s story.

Robin Sexton twitched, rocked slightly, and stared into the fire.

Then Larry’s voice lowered to a sinister whisper, and he said, “We only ever found one clue that remained of Marshmallow Jeff and the boys from Earth. Out there . . .”

Larry stretched his arm out and pointed off into the woods on the opposite side of the creek from the mess hall. “Their shoes—six pairs, counting Marshmallow Jeff ’s—were all perfectly lined up by the well house. And there were a few marshmallows scattered on the ground. That was it. Nothing else. It was a mystery, but the boys and Marshmallow Jeff were never seen again. Unless, that is, if you believe the stories some people tell of seeing a big barefoot white man who wanders the woods and hunts for children with baits of marshmallows.”

“I call bullshit,” Cobie Petersen said.

“Oh yeah?” Larry was irritated. “I dare you kid—right now, I bet you could go out there in the woods past the well house, and you’ll see footprints—bare feet—that belong to Marshmallow Jeff and the crazy boys he abducted from Earth.”

And Larry added, “I dare you, tough guy. Let’s all go take a look inside the old Earth cabin right now, if you have the balls. Marshmallow Jeff and his friends are waiting for you.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.