by Andrew Smith
But even more horrifying was that after the mouth, ear, and nostril exams, Mrs. Nussbaum took me into another small room where she stood me next to a metal screen and took X-rays of every part of my body, from my skull to my bare feet.
“It’s all in the name of research, Ahh-riel!” she squealed.
COFFEE FOR GOD
“You’re lost,” 3-60 said.
The melting man was, in fact, lost. He had also reattached the kitchen timers to his ears because there were too many voices he didn’t want to listen to, and they kept telling him what to do.
The kitchen timers looked nice beneath the low overhang of the melting man’s plaid stingy-brim hat.
Crystal Lutz also helped the melting man by playing an accordion whenever Joseph Stalin told him things. The melting man did not know where the accordion came from. Crystal Lutz told him she’d stolen it from the thrift store in Lafayette.
“How could you get away with stealing an accordion?” Leonard Fountain—the melting man, whom Crystal Lutz knew as Igor Zelinsky—asked.
The melting man was completely insane. Also, he was melting, and Crystal Lutz was not real at all.
“Lenny, you’re about to crash into a Mennonite in a horse buggy,” 3-60 said.
“Keep your eyes on the road, idiot!” Joseph Stalin said.
Crystal Lutz lifted a full-sized piano accordion and began playing an upbeat, polka version of the national anthem of the United States.
Joseph Stalin did not like Crystal Lutz.
“Huh?” the melting man said. He looked up and swerved the U-Haul van back onto the right side of the road.
The Mennonite stuck his middle finger up at Leonard Fountain, and screamed, “Blow me, bitch!”
“You are lost; you nearly killed us all,” 3-60 pointed out.
Leonard Fountain had driven the old U-Haul van through a place called Slemp, which was in Kentucky.
“You are pulling onto the shoulder of the road,” 3-60 said.
“What’s wrong?” Crystal Lutz asked.
“Look at the road!” The melting man’s pus-crusted eyes stared wide.
Ahead, the highway became a churning lava flow, crackling and burbling, blazing the most brilliant red and orange. Red-eared turtles the size of Volkswagens paddled through the lava, and albino kangaroos stood on opposite banks, playing volleyball across the river of molten rock using live kittens as balls.
“Look!” Crystal Lutz said, “Kangaroos!”
“White ones,” the melting man said.
The melting man’s brain was turning into pudding.
“You are looking at the kittens and kangaroos,” 3-60 narrated.
“Keep driving!” Joseph Stalin said.
The melting man didn’t know what to do.
And the kitchen timers ticked and ticked.
- - -
I took off the clown suit I’d been wearing for weeks.
I asked Emel to turn away from me when I changed because I didn’t have anything at all underneath it. I don’t like undressing in front of women. When I dropped the tattered suit onto the ground at my feet, it was almost as though it had become part of the road, that it disappeared.
Garen handed me a pair of worn jeans. They were old and faded on the knees, but clean, and with the belt he gave me, they fit properly. Then he passed me an undershirt. It was pink. I didn’t mind. In my first life, I had no concept of boy colors or girl colors; this was something I was unaware of until I came to America, where there are specific rules about such things. My favorite thing Garen gave me was an old sweater—it was soft and loose, narrowly striped black, white, and blue, with a wide neck that laced shut with three sets of metal eyeholes.
I felt different, like I’d been emptied out at some point in my past, and now that I’d come through the gate and changed my clothes—for the first time since my fourteenth birthday—I was filled up with something strange and new.
When I was dressed, Emel turned around and gave me an approving and sad look.
“You look like a new person,” she said.
It was a miracle, I thought; the opening line of another story.
I slipped my feet back into my shoes. Something didn’t make sense.
“Thank you for the clothes. They are very nice,” I said. “Who did they belong to?”
Garen said, “You told me you would pull the wagon. We have a long way to walk. Let’s go now.”
I could tell you the story of where the clothes Garen gave me came from, Max. It was the second terrible story—after the one about Thaddeus and his little dog—that someone had given to me to carry along in my library of all the terrible stories that happened to me.
“He was fourteen,” Garen said.
I was pulling the wagon and it was night. We were all very tired, although the baby did not fuss at all. Garen was looking for a suitable place for us to stop and sleep. On either side of the road were a few starving cherry trees.
“Who was?”
“My brother.”
“Oh.”
Of course I knew he was talking about where the clothes he’d given me came from. I didn’t want him to tell me about the boy, even though I knew he would.
“I am fourteen,” I said.
Garen nodded. “You look like him.”
“Oh.”
“He was named Ocean. Did you ever know anyone named Ocean?”
“Never.”
“Our parents were reckless like that, you know? Names like that are not allowed for legal matters and such.”
“I think it’s a good name,” I said.
“It was destined to make him difficult.”
“Do you think?”
“Yes.” Garen said, “Two days before the bombing. Ocean used to serve coffee at a stall in the market. He did it for tips, a few coins a day maybe. He was a very stubborn and outspoken boy.”
“You don’t need to tell me about him.”
“You asked.”
“That was a few hours ago.”
“I’ve been thinking about him all this time.”
“It stands to reason,” I said, “he was your brother, after all.”
“After everything, yes. We are still brothers, I suppose.”
Garen continued, “Two days before the bombing, a man who’d come for coffee overheard Ocean saying how could anyone who lived in war believe there was a god; that if God himself sat down there, Ocean would not get coffee for him. The man—he was FDJA, do you know?—was outraged at my brother’s words. He grabbed Ocean by the neck and struck him and called him a blasphemer and a polytheist. At least, this is what I was told afterward.”
“He doesn’t sound like a polytheist to me,” I said.
Garen shook his head. “It’s hard to understand where some people get their ideas. Then the man said this is what God does to blasphemers, and he shot Ocean two times in his face. Then he finished his coffee. Everyone in the square saw what happened. They told me. He just sat there with his legs crossed and quietly finished his coffee. There were flecks of my brother’s blood on his face, and he smoked a cigarette. Then the man got up and walked away, and left my brother lying there in the street.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What can you do about such things?”
“Feel sick, I suppose.”
“Yes. And then the planes came. And I found myself looking at Thia, our daughter. It’s difficult to think about the future when somebody is shooting at you.”
“I never thought about that, but, yes, I think you’re right,” I said.
“When someone is shooting at you, you don’t think about the future, and you don’t care about God,” Garen said.
I couldn’t answer him. What could I say? He was right. Ocean was right.
“Do you care about God?” Garen
asked. “No. I don’t think you do. You’re too much like Ocean. I can see that. Who else would have helped open the gate for us?”
“Well, we were all heading the same way.”
- - -
That night we slept in a collapsing mechanic’s shop on the side of the road. All the windows were broken, and there were no doors on the building, not even the big one for vehicles to drive through, but being inside a place made us all feel safer, I think.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 1880—BELUN
Mr. Murdoch’s vision has not improved. I am afraid his blindness is permanent, poor demented thing that he is.
This morning Mr. Warren and I finally spoke to each other about what happened at the village on Lena River Delta. If this is any manner of a confession, then so be it. He and I both knew that when the opportunity to leave the delta manifested that we were driven to take Katkov’s beast with us to the West—to save it—it was something we had to do.
We did not stop Murdoch in his mad rampage, and we are both troubled beyond measure by our unwillingness to intervene.
“He would have killed us, too,” I offered.
To which, Mr. Warren replied, “You know fully well he would not have harmed you, Dr. Merrie.”
And I am afraid Mr. Warren is correct.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1881—LONDON
Having settled last week into my old lodgings in Whitechapel with the newspaperman, Mr. Warren, who tells me he is unwilling to ever attempt an ocean crossing again. I can’t fault him for the opinion, and we have become such close companions in any event.
Our relationship would be deemed corrupt, but I have an enduring attraction for the American. It is also the case that Warren and I are bound to each other by something that goes beyond mutual fondness.
And to think that my journey from here, to San Francisco, and the subsequent ordeal on the expedition of the ill-fated Alex Crow have brought me entirely around the world and home again!
Poor blind Murdoch has been confined to an asylum. He will be better off for it, I should think. Tonight, Mr. Warren and I will display our oddity at Hastings’s Penny Gaff.
Iain Hastings’s Penny Gaff occupies a former fishmonger’s stall on Broad Street. On Monday nights, Hastings offers as many as six performances, each of them packed noisily with nearly two hundred unclean factory or errand boys, and far fewer factory girls who infrequently are daring enough to attend such events. These are shows for working boys of the lowest demeanor.
The factory boys—orphans for the most part—live in rookeries, which are rooms where the boys pay a penny per night to sleep on the floor. Landlords crowd them into such an extent that oftentimes latecomers are forced to squat against a wall or in a doorway. There is one such deplorable building two doors down from us here. The working boys come to the Penny Gaff in throngs on Monday nights.
Iain Hastings’s establishment promises the bawdiest and most shocking of entertainments, and it is never an uncommon thing to witness surprised spectators turning their reddened faces away from the performers or covering their modest ears—boys and girls alike. For it is here at Has-tings’s Penny Gaff where audiences stand slack-jawed, amid the ancient smells of cod, salmon, and plaice that fog above the damp musk of sweat, ale, and shag tobacco, at once spellbound and repulsed by Hastings’s predilection for human oddities: the “Mirror Man,” a small Portuguese fisherman with a complete miniature twin sprouting limp and lifeless from his breastbone; or the unaccountably formed half man–half woman, “Little Christopher,” a dwarf who unashamedly poses and displays the neighboring sets of male and female genitalia, completely naked before the fascinated and appalled spectators.
Naturally, as a man of medicine, I find these human rarities somewhat remarkable. Mr. Warren is consistently fascinated by the spectacle as well.
But Hastings’s Gaff is also the place where Mr. Warren and I make a show of our oddity—the creature in ice, Mr. Katkov’s Siberian Devil.
THE VERNACULAR OF MAX
When I came back to Jupiter from my private session with Mrs. Nussbaum the day after Cobie Petersen and Max talked me into smoking pot with them, Mrs. Nussbaum put my brother, and then Cobie, through pretty much the same routine of head-hole inspections, knee repair, and X-ray exams that I’d gone through.
I never asked Trent Mendibles or Robin Sexton what Mrs. Nussbaum did to them. As far as I could tell, Mrs. Nussbaum considered boys like Trent and Robin to be the normal ones—the boys she was depending on to steer the extinction of males (and if anyone could do it, the normal boys of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys would)—but she was highly suspicious of the other three boys of Jupiter.
So I told Max and Cobie the details of everything that had happened to me in Mrs. Nussbaum’s examination room, even how I was scared that the ointment she put on my scraped knees might have contained some of Mrs. Nussbaum’s girl sperm. They laughed at me. But every one of us was a little bit bothered by the colorful poster of the male reproductive system that hung on Mrs. Nussbaum’s examination room wall.
How could you not look at something like that? It was like standing on the edge of an empty field and witnessing a bloody car crash on the road you’re about to cross.
Then I told them about the questions she’d asked me—about what I meant when I wrote “inside a refrigerator” on my index card.
“Yeah,” Max said, “why did you write that?”
I shrugged. “It was the first place I could think of that was better than here.”
We were alone in Jupiter—well, except for Robin Sexton who just lay on his cot and stared up at the ceiling, pretending to be listening to music. Larry, as usual, was gone, and Trent Mendibles at that moment was probably sitting shirtless on the examination bed and having his hairy knees salved by Mrs. Nussbaum.
Max told us that Mrs. Nussbaum asked him a lot of questions after she read what he’d written on his index card. Unlike me, my brother kept adding to the card nearly every day, so Max had run out of room on one side and asked Mrs. Nussbaum if she would give him a new one.
Max said that she was thrilled he had kept writing on his card about where he’d rather be than at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, because it meant my brother was focused on better things and more positive experiences, and thinking like that motivates boys to take action. After seeing what Max had written on his card, I had to agree that Max was definitely motivated to take action on his positive experiences. He proudly showed Cobie Petersen and me what he’d been writing. And Max did not have the most legible penmanship, but these are some of the things I could decipher from Max’s scrawl:
Where I would rather be than at Camp
Merrie-Seymour for Boys:
Agitating my youth group
Encountering heaven through dance
Whipping up some jelly
Icing the jewelry store
Painting some sea monsters
My brother was an artist with words.
Max said Mrs. Nussbaum spent several minutes staring at his card. Then she looked at him, looked at his card again, looked at Max. This went on for some time, according to Max.
Finally, she said, “Max, tell me, what does all this mean?”
Max told her they were titles of poems he was planning on writing, when he had bigger pieces of paper.
Max said she came right out and told him this: “These all sound like they might be references to masturbation. Are they? Have you been masturbating since you came to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Max?”
And Max said, “How could you even think that? What kind of sick kid would waste his time writing poetry about masturbation?”
He said Mrs. Nussbaum turned red (Max was awfully good at embarrassing her), gave him a new index card, and then sent him on his way, back to Jupiter.
Since we were in a sharing mood, after Mrs. Nussbaum was finished with his examination, Co
bie Petersen also showed us his index card. Like me, Cobie never amended his choice since the first day. His card read: Fishing or coon hunting up Dumpling Run with Ezra and nobody else.
We already knew Ezra was Cobie Petersen’s dog—the one who’d gotten pooed on by the Dumpling Man in Cobie’s scary story.
“Well,” Cobie told Max, “I could change my card now to say I wouldn’t mind if you and Ariel came along. I would kind of like that, I suppose.”
“Awww. I’m touched,” Max said.
“I’d go fishing or coon hunting with you, Cobie,” I said.
“Coon hunting sounds like slang for jerking off,” Max said.
“Everything sounds like slang for jerking off when you say it,” Cobie Petersen replied.
He was right.
He told us Mrs. Nussbaum asked about Cobie’s real name, which was Colton Benjamin Petersen, and about Dumpling Run.
“It’s a beautiful part of the state of West Virginia,” Mrs. Nussbaum had said.
Cobie Petersen said he liked to lay on the West Virginia–boy accent extra thick when he talked to Mrs. Nussbaum.
“’Deed it is,” Cobie told her.
“And interesting how many people up along the run are all named Peterson or Petersen,” she said.
“It ain’t very interesting to me, ma’am,” Cobie said. “But I am wondering something.”
“Oh! You can feel free to ask me anything, Cobie!” Mrs. Nussbaum said.
“I’m wondering why you have that big poster of a penis on the wall of your examination room.”
“Oh! Ha-ha!” Mrs. Nussbaum said, “You know, boys around your age are always so curious about those parts of their bodies, Cobie!”
“Well, if we were that curious, I reckon we wouldn’t have to look as far away as the wall of your examination room to find out pretty much everything we wanted to know,” Cobie Petersen pointed out.
Cobie told us this observation flustered her, too.
“Did she take all those X-ray pictures of everything in your body?” Max asked.
Cobie Petersen nodded.
I said, “I think she is suspicious of us because we’re not like the other kids here—the normal kids at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. And she asked about our dad working at Alex Division.”
