A Children's Bible

by Lydia Millet

  We needed to have a sit-down, him and me. But when?

  I kept putting it off. The guy was only nine. He still couldn’t tell time on a clock that had hands.

  Then came the yacht kids, with their medical marijuana and toned physiques. They all went to the same boarding school. And hailed from Southern California, Bel Air and Palos Verdes and the Palisades.

  We soon saw it was different there.

  “Your folks,” said the alpha male, stoned. They’d carried over their camp chairs: no sitting on towels for them. “They got a compound yet?”

  “A compound?” asked Sukey, and took a drag. Held it in. She was sitting a bit too close to him, seemed to be basking in the Abercrombie aura. “You mean like—a pot-growing compound?”

  “You’re funny,” said the alpha, and nudged her with a muscular shoulder. Playful.

  His name was James. He didn’t go by Jim.

  “Hilarious,” said Sukey, passing the joint to Juice.

  “You know, a survival home for chaos time? Ours is in Washington,” said another yacht kid. He had a flouncy bandanna tied around his neck.

  A really bad idea. Fashion-wise, he seemed to be their equivalent of Low.

  “State, not district. Obviously,” he added.

  “Ours is in Oregon,” said James. “Huge solar array. Looks like fucking Ivanpah. Eleven backup generators.”

  Juice had no idea what they were talking about, but that had never stopped him.

  “No, yeah. Eleven seems like overkill,” he said.

  James cocked his head, patient but wise.

  “With engineering on compounds, redundancy is key,” he explained. “It’s about multiple points of failure. Integrated system design.”

  “No offense,” I said, “but we don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Speak for yourself,” objected Sukey.

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “OK, Sukey. Educate me.”

  “Hey, Jack!” she called. “You want dessert? Come over here! These guys brought s’mores!”

  Classic deflection. I had to hand it to her.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” said Jack, a bit plaintive.

  “Just pee in the ocean, little man,” said James. “The ocean’s large. It may not be able to beat that plummeting pH, but your piss it can handle.”

  Jack shook his head, shy.

  He’d read a book about scary animals. When you peed in open water, a spiny fish might crawl up the stream of pee and burrow into your penis. A river fish in the Amazon, and possibly mythic, but he’d read the book when he was eight and I suspected he might be recalling it.

  “I’ll take him,” I said, and rose to be a big sister.

  “It’s number two,” whispered Jack urgently, as we headed up into the dunes.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I’ll get the toilet paper.”

  Back in the pavilion, pawing through our supplies by the small light of a lantern, I overheard some talk around the bonfire.

  “I heard Missy T.’s compound is in Germany,” one yacht kid said to another. “That big bunker under a mountain? A Cold War deal built by the Soviets?”

  “Vivos. It’s got its own train station.”

  “Hardened against a close-range nuclear blast.”

  “The nuclear threat. So quaint.”

  “It’s like, if only. Right?”

  “The climate deal makes nukes look kind of sweet. Like being scared of cannons.”

  “Slingshots.”

  “A Hyksos recurve bow.”

  “Canaanite sickle-swords.”

  I wasn’t up on my Canaanites. Maybe I’d google later.

  “They’ve got a DNA vault. Does yours have a vault?”

  “Nah. But it does have a seed bank. Non-hybrid.”

  “Missy. Man. We’ll never see her ass again. Planes won’t be flying, by that time. Even her daddy’s Falcon 900.”

  “Bye-bye, air-traffic control. Bye-bye, Missy.”

  “Too bad. Man. Missy gives excellent head.”

  “You got that right. Shee-yit.”

  I had to keep these guys away from Jack.

  BUT IT WAS only at nighttime, relaxed by a strain called the Oracle—which retailed at eight hundred bucks an ounce, James said—that the yacht kids discussed their families’ preparations for the end-times.

  By day they played beach volleyball. For hours. They never seemed to get tired of it, and they had genuine talent. I could picture the girls performing in the Summer Olympics, their shining bodies camera bait. Sometimes they took breaks to fool around in the dunes or lie out—I’d thought that practice vanished back in the twentieth, but the yacht kids didn’t care about skin cancer. If they lived long enough to get a bunch of melanomas, they figured, they’d bust out the champagne.

  There were two girls and four boys. Their numbers were smaller than ours, but they made up for it in raw personal strength. All of us put together as one team couldn’t beat them. Couldn’t touch them, even.

  We made a joke out of it. Our only face-saving option.

  At regular intervals they checked in with their parents, fawning. I heard the kid with the neck bandanna compliment his mother on a nasty purple-and-orange sarong.

  The parents were their insurance policy, James said. Diplomatic relations had to be maintained.

  “But I mean, even if you acted like jerks, they wouldn’t, like, abandon you,” said Jen, on night two.

  The yacht parents had appeared in the late morning, sat drinking in a state of soft paralysis—not unlike our own parents’—until the sun went down, then left again to have a nightcap on the deck. A three-person galley staff had served them lunch and dinner on the beach, plus mixed drinks from a portable bar.

  The yacht, I’d noticed on a walk down the beach, bore the gold-lettered name Cobra. She wasn’t rented, like the great house, but owned outright by James’s father—a “VC,” as he put it.

  That stood for venture capitalist, Terry annoyingly informed us as though we didn’t know.

  I mean, I didn’t know, technically, but it did ring a bell.

  James’s mother was missing in action. Probably she was alive, but eyes glazed over when you asked. The father had a third trophy wife, four years older than James. She was a model, said a yacht girl named Tess.

  I’d packed Jack off to bed, where he lay next to Shel, reading with his headlamp on at the far end of the pavilion. Frog and Toad Are Friends, his favorite book. His second favorite series was George and Martha. A pair of kindly hippos. Platonically devoted to each other.

  He could read much more advanced books—books without any pictures at all—and liked those too. But he was nostalgic for his old standbys.

  “You’d still be their kids,” pressed Jen. “What, they’re going to leave you outside the walls to drown when the floodwaters come up?”

  “It’s about interpersonal capital,” said James. “We prefer not to squander it. What you want is straight A’s. You want a perfect record. Unblemished. You want to maintain a 4.0.”

  Sukey was sitting on one side of him, Jen on the other. I sat across from all three of them, neutral as Switzerland. Personally, I felt no urge to hook up with James. He was handsome enough, or whatever, but he reminded me of margarine. Sneakers that were still stiff from the store. Maybe a roll of thick, bleached paper towels.

  “But how do you pull it off?” asked Sukey. “I mean. The drugs. The sex. Just for starters. You get stoned. You get laid. Does that get you a 4.0, in Southern California?”

  “Well. Those are coping strategies,” said James.

  He always had an answer.

  “Discretion is the better part of valor,” added Tess. “May I have the bong?”

  “Henry IV, Part 1,” said James, passing it over. “Act 5, Scene 4. Falstaff.”

  “A common misquote,” said the neckerchief guy. “Sorry, Tess. ‘The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.’ Lines 3085–3086.”

>   “Falstaff plays dead on the battlefield,” nodded James. “Then defends his cowardice.”

  The yacht kids had their own game. It was called Memorize Shake­speare.

  “Demerit, demerit, demerit,” said Rafe grumpily.

  BY LUNCHTIME ON day three we had a food shortage. Some­one had left the largest cooler open and gulls perched on the edges, ripping at bread bags with their powerful beaks. Fragments of fruit and cheese littered the sand, and soon even those had been snatched—the gulls were nothing like deer. They didn’t scatter when we yelled, or if they did, it was mostly for show. They came right back.

  They got up in our grills, pecking. Gobbling.

  So we gave up.

  I felt bitter about a packet of cookies I’d been saving.

  “We need to make a supply run,” said Terry, when the finger-pointing ended. “Two of us have to go upriver.”

  “Or we could go back now,” suggested Rafe. “I miss flush toilets.”

  “No way,” said Jen. “I’m not done with James.”

  Terry shot her a wounded look. She ignored it.

  “Let’s draw straws,” said David.

  We used dune grass. We didn’t pull it out—Jack warned us not to hurt the plants—but snipped it neatly with a penknife. The shortest blades went to Terry and Rafe, who carried the empty coolers into a boat and began to row. Terry was visibly sulking.

  Once the boat disappeared up the creek, a few of us strolled over to where the yacht kids were feasting on lobster rolls. Dee’d found some hand sanitizer near the chef’s table and was rubbing it on her body like sunscreen—her own supply must have run out. Sukey and Jen and I picked cans of soda from the yacht kids’ cooler, then sat beside Tess under the shade of her umbrella as Low loomed over us, potentially ogling. No room left on her beach blanket.

  “It’s our last night,” she said, dipping a shrimp appetizer in red sauce. “We head to Newport in the morning.”

  “So soon?” said Sukey.

  “Really?” asked Jen.

  They both sounded disappointed.

  “Supposed to leave yesterday,” said Tess, chewing. “But James talked them into staying. For some reason.”

  Sukey and Jen looked at each other. Sukey took a swig from her can, extended one of her long legs, pointed the toes, turned the foot this way and that. Jen grabbed a shrimp from Tess’s cup and popped it in her mouth.

  I stared at the shrimps’ little black eyeballs on their stalks.

  “Watch. They’ll be fighting over who gets to hook up with that Aryan douchebag,” said Low, as he and I walked away.

  When push came to shove, the yacht kids were just too WASP for him. He was a jewel of Kazakh youth, he liked to say—studied history so he could boast about Mongolian hordes. He’d mailed a cheek swab to some genetic-testing service, and the results suggested he was Genghis Khan’s nephew.

  Some generations removed. But basically, yeah, he said.

  Jack and I went down the beach so he could look for periwinkles (rough, northern yellow, and European, he informed me). He was a bit afraid of the waves, so he didn’t wade in the surf the way I did. Instead he sat by a tide pool for hours, searching for fish and other small creatures. He carefully replaced each rock he moved, worried that he might hurt a crab.

  Me, I sat and gazed at the breakers and sky. That was my preferred activity at the seaside. I tried to disappear into the stretches of water and air. I pushed my attention higher and higher, through the atmosphere, till I could almost imagine I saw the earth. As the astronauts had when they went to the moon.

  If you could be nothing, you could also be everything. Once my molecules had dispersed, I would be here forever. Free.

  Part of the timeless. The sky and the ocean would also be me.

  Molecules never die, I thought.

  Hadn’t they told us that in chemistry? Hadn’t they said a molecule of Julius Caesar’s dying breath was, statistically speaking, in every breath we took? Same with Lincoln. Or our grandparents.

  Molecules exchanging and mingling, on and on. Particles that had once been others and now moved through us.

  “Evie!” said Jack. “Look! I found a sand dollar!”

  That was the sad thing about my molecules: they wouldn’t remember him.

  WHEN WE GOT back the galley staff had switched from lunch to dinner. The sky was banded with faint stripes of pink, and two yacht parents were swimming—a rare event. I saw our green rowboat slip out of the tangle of reeds and brush that marked the mouth of the creek, move into the delta.

  There were three passengers now, not two.

  “Who’s that?” asked Jack, squinting toward the boat. I couldn’t tell.

  Most of our group was over with the yacht kids, where there were food and drinks to be foraged. Only Low and Val hung around our pavilion. As we padded across the sand toward them, our wet shoes hanging from our bent fingers, I saw something looming—something elaborate and dark.

  They’d built a massive sandcastle, a tower that rose to a point at the top. It had a circular base and row after row of shelf-like layers ascending in a spiral. They stood on either side of it, sand in their hair and caked under their fingernails, holding cooking pots and spatulas.

  “Came to me in a vision,” said Low.

  “Vision,” said Val.

  “Of a tower,” said Low.

  “I can see that,” I said.

  “It’s cool,” said Jack, staring up.

  “Huh,” said Low, as he turned to look at the boat. “Wait. Is that Alycia?”

  We barely recalled what she looked like.

  We waved and waited as the boat drew near. Rafe handled the oars as Terry jumped out and dragged the bow up onto the sandbank, and Alycia, wearing a long silken dress and silver pumps, stepped delicately onto the sand.

  The ocean breeze blew her flimsy gown against her body. Hip bones jutted out on either side of her concave stomach.

  I’d once seen a picture of sacred cows on the Ganges. Starving.

  “What’s with the outfit?” I asked.

  “No time to change,” she said. “Had to make a quick getaway.” She kicked the pumps off, pulled the dress over her head. There she stood in a lacy bra and butt-floss thong.

  Some yacht dads gazed our way.

  “Evie!” stage-whispered Jack to me. “She’s naked!”

  “Listen, kid,” said Alycia. “What was your name again?”

  “Jack?” said Jack.

  “Right, right. Well, Jack, I can show you naked if you want. But this isn’t it. See this piece of fabric? They call it under­wear.”

  “But I can see your regina.”

  “Jack, it’s your lucky day.”

  She turned from us, splashed through the shallows, and dove. Graceful as a dolphin.

  The yacht dads rubbernecked. She front-crawled out past the breakers.

  “Why is my day lucky?” asked Jack.

  I tousled his hair.

  “So she was with that older man in the dive bar in town,” said Rafe, coming up the sandbank with the smallest cooler. “She was giving him, like, a lap dance. Her dad walked in and freaked. Saying stuff about arresting the guy. He wanted to press charges. For rape. Only statutory, obviously.”

  “Rape,” nodded Val. “But only statutory.”

  “The guy said he thought she was twenty-four. But get this: turns out the dad was there on a Tinder date. Which Alycia knew because she saw the chick swiping on her phone before he got there. Alycia’s all, Mom wouldn’t like that much, would she? So let’s just both keep our mouths shut. Essentially, blackmail.”

  “Blackmail,” said Val. “Essentially.”

  I didn’t appreciate Alycia’s attitude toward Jack, but man. She was no shrinking violet.

  AN INVITATION CAME down from the yacht: aboard the Cobra, for her last evening anchored in our cove, there would be a party. We were invited.

  My bet was, it was Alycia’s presence that had inspired the invite.

&nb
sp; The girls all wanted to attend, except for Val. The boys didn’t, at first, except for Rafe, who liked anything expensive.

  We had words.

  “You guys are fraternizing with the enemy,” said Low.

  I sympathized, though these days whenever I felt a kinship with Low it was followed by minor but nagging disgust, remembering the banana. Also an irritation that was close to regret, because Low, without banana breath, and if you changed out his wardrobe for one less hideous, could pass for attractive.

  It made me think of how thin the border was between attractive and not, and yet—if it was there, you didn’t want to cross it.

  But he was right: the yacht was teeming with parents, as bad as ours and probably worse.

  “What are you so afraid of?” said Sukey. “Are you gutless? Or just spineless?”

  A yacht, a model, and a last night with the Oracle. Passing those up was worse than fraternizing with the enemy, said Sukey. It was a form of self-injury.

  Jack wasn’t much for parties unless they had a bounce house and birthday cake. He wanted to spend some time with his Frog and Toad Treasury, but after that, he said, he had to read another book.

  “One of the mothers gave it to me,” he said. “Like an assignment. She said I needed to read it.”

  Plus Jen was determined to go to the party, which meant Shel needed watching, too. So I wouldn’t be attending.

  I was disappointed.

  Sailors broke down the creamy high-end tents, packed them into neat small bundles and loaded them and the yacht kids into the powerboat.

  “Goodbye,” said James to me before he boarded. We shook hands on it. “I fear we will not meet again. From here to eternity.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “But what’s your Snapchat?”

  “I’m not allowed Snapchat.”

  “Instagram, then.”

  When the sun was sinking to the horizon the boat came back to ferry us out. I watched from the shore as Alycia stood at the bow in her thin, rippling dress and bare feet, a figurehead. Her black hair flew out behind her as the boat picked up speed.

  She wasn’t even wearing a lifejacket. The pilot had made the rest of them sit down, awkward and suffocated in their orange vests. But he hadn’t uttered a peep to her, it seemed. Maybe intimidated.