by Lauren Groff
Thanks for the treats, Daddy dearest, she says, shaking it like a bell. Then she’s gone.
Bit finds himself standing in the middle of Handy’s room, his whole world swimming up around him. Handy turns to Bit, his face red. They look at one another across the expanse, and Handy says, Listen, Little Bit. I know your pops and me aren’t getting along right now, though we used to be best friends, and that grieves me. But I like you for you. Some kids just have goodness deep down in them, gentle little souls. So you do me a favor and stay as far away from my daughter as you can. That girl is fucked in the head, I’m telling you. You hear me?
Yes, sir, Bit says; and now he is irrationally afraid that Handy is going to ask him about the plot of weed on the little island in the woods, that it is all going to spill out of his mouth and then Hannah and Abe and he will be thrown from Arcadia into the cold night. He steps around Handy, and when he comes back down to the Eatery to his friends, they are still playing with the bottle cap, waiting for him. They scan his face. He can see each one coming to the decision not to ask him what happened. In the long draw of last light across the Eatery, as the tables around them are scrubbed with white vinegar and only they are left in their island of four, flicking the bottle cap from one to another in silence, he is grateful, again, for the infinite generosity of boys.
At the midafternoon field break under the wild cherrywood trees, Bit sits listening to two of the Circenses Singers who went to the rally against nuclear armaments in Central Park. They are talking about how Springsteen was both electric and a throwback, how the taste of a hot dog with yellow mustard brought them close to tears. Bit feels ill at the thought of meat in his mouth. Someone is saying: . . . the countries were like little boys standing in a pool of kerosene, bragging about how many matches they have in their hands . . .
Bit stops listening: Helle is nearing, under a huge sombrero, clutching a bouquet of cornflowers. She sits beside him and gives him the flowers. He holds out for ten seconds. Then he touches her thin ankle, forgiving her. She touches his knee, grateful to be forgiven.
After the discomfort passes—blazing sun forgotten, hotspots numbed to blisters, shoulders’ rise and dip overcoming the ache by sheer repetition—the future sharpens before him, the way every blade of grass on a clear summer morning seems etched by a pin. He is in Arcadia still. He feels himself older, his body tighter in the joints, the muscles softer. He can feel his parents nearby. And Helle is there, older, too, and smiling, and she loves him.
He feels his hope breathing and stretching, a living creature.
He closes his eyes to keep the daydream in. Fervently, he bargains. It doesn’t have to be as perfect as it had been in the brief pulse of a vision. He knows that a longing for perfection is the hole in the dam that can let everything pour out. He doesn’t have to be as elevated as Handy when he’s older, or even Abe, or even Titus; he can be a normal person, a worker bee, a Wolf. Helle doesn’t have to be so beautiful; she could lose her looks tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter. If he had to give up the quiet, good dreams he has started to have about himself, a life of making photographs, for Helle loving him, for living the rest of his life in Arcadia, he would.
He focuses again. Cole is at the end of the row looking at Bit, lines between his eyebrows. You okay, man? Cole says.
Language fails Bit. No words could possibly contain all he has to say. He manages to utter, at last, I’m okay, and this is enough for now.
The gang is in its hideaway in the basement, finishing the prank. Helle’s music blares on the deck, cassettes she’d shoplifted in the Outside. Cole nods to the driving beat, Dylan winces, Ike thrashes. Bit tries to listen, to love it, but unlike the friendly folk of his youth, this music is furious, full of rusted nails and bile, the darkness in the world beyond. It feels like private anarchy. Bit hopes nobody in the rooms above can hear.
Punk, Ike had said in his jittery way the first time he put it on. Sex Pistols. Fuck, yeah! Now he lies on a broken settee and spins out names for their own band.
The Pissers, the Fockups, Badmass Mothafathas, he says.
Dylan says, Spade and the Whities.
The rest are careful not to look at one another. Two months ago, Dylan discovered he was black, though everyone else, it seems, had known for years. Now Dylan teases his hair into a short Afro and hangs out at the Motor Pool with Peanut. Now he axes, digs, finnas to do. It is embarrassing to peachy white Cole how unnatural this language sounds in his little brother’s mouth, how hard he seems to be trying.
Hearts of Darkness, Biohazards, the Bloody Mayhem. Shrimp and the Shrimptones. No, no, no! Bit Sinister and the Kidney Stones, says Ike.
Bit puts down the toadstool on which he has glued a Monopoly house, liberated from a half-dead game at the Store. He is weary of his friends. Under his several pressures—the crop in the woods, Helle screaming at him the other night, sweet to him this afternoon—the boys seem childish, stuck in their innocence. Helle had invited Bit to a party at the Runaway Quonset tonight, Break down the invisible barriers between the Old and the New! she’d said. End the apartheid! but Bit had refused out of a sense of duty to his friends. Now he has a pang of regret. He would like to be near Helle, if just to insulate her from people like Armand Hammer.
He says, How about Antonine Plague and the Buboes?
Cole whistles. The other two go quiet. Then Dyllie nods and says, If that in’t just like Bit Sinister. Don’t say much, but when he do, it’s right on.
Right on, echoes Ike. Antonine Plague and the Buboes. Lead singer Isaac Vomit.
Excuse me? Cole says. Your voice is shit.
It’s punk. It’s supposed to be shit, says Ike, and Bit relaxes into their squabble.
Their hideaway is behind a heap of furniture that the Free People salvaged when they renovated Arcadia House so long ago: it is all broken, but not impossibly, waiting eight years for somebody to have free time to patch it up and put it back into commission. The boys have strung the marijuana plants they gleaned from the woods on the rafters, where they hang like sleeping bats. Cole rolls a spliff and passes it around. When Bit breathes the smoke out, the world relaxes the close of its fist on him.
He is grateful for marijuana. He’s sure it’ll stunt his growth, but he’s resigned to being five foot three. His friends have all beanpoled over six foot, even Dyllie, who is younger than Bit, thirteen in a month.
Bit shakes the gold paint he took from the Motor Pool and sprays the whole project.
Finished, he says. The others stand to look at his handiwork. Cole gives a low whistle. Bit Sinister, he says, you’re a fucking artist, man.
On a board, there is a tiny golden village of toadstools and windmills and even an octagonal barn Bit made of an oatmeal cylinder.
Time check, Bit says, and Dyllie looks at the clock he liberated from the Biz Unit, the only people who have a timepiece in Arcadia. He says, 4:30 a.m.
Showtime, Bit says. Ike gives a giggle. They put the balaclavas Peanut bought for them at Kmart over their faces. Now they are complete, transformed into their own dark side. A hippie gang, utopian goons; they call themselves the Sowers of Destruction.
They creep out into the night. Ike and Cole carry the diorama between them, Dyllie a bag of moss, Bit the box of accoutrements. Beyond the Tool Corner, the Pottery wheels, up the root cellar steps, into the courtyard. They hear a sound and pause to listen, but it is only the tap of oak branches against windows. They can still hear the party raging down at the Runaway Quonset, and Bit has to hold his breath to banish the thought of Helle high, Helle kissing someone else, Helle passed out on the floor.
Into the Children’s Wing they go, into the Schoolroom, up the stairs in their bare feet.
The breath of the sleeping children fills the Dormitory with sweetness. Maria and Phyllis sleep on cots in the corner; Sweetie sits in the overstuffed chair in the play area, snoring. The boys lower the miniature Arcadia carefully to the ground, and Bit takes out the sphagnum moss. Silently, they cover the
board and its edges and place other bits of moss and wee ferns throughout the room. Ike sprinkles glitter on the pillows of the kidlets. Cole puts the teacups made of acorns on the windowsills. Dyllie scatters the pieces of birch bark with tiny cuneiform scratched on them. Bit presses footprints over every surface with a clothespin and baby powder.
Just before they leave, Bit motions the other three out. This is the trickiest moment, and if someone is to be caught, it should be him. He can contort himself out of punishment like a small Houdini. He closes a window and it comes down softly. Into the sill crack, he places two dozen butterfly wings: blue-dazzled, green, yellow, luna pale, moth brown with furry startled eyes.
Now he joins his friends out under the oak, leans against its warmth. It is near dawn. The cooks move in the Eatery.
Soon from the window they hear a little voice say a dazzled Oooooooh. Then it calls out, Wake up, wake up, wake up, the fairies have been here! Everyone, wake up!
Ike snorts into his hands. Cole bites his smile into his knees. Dyllie laughs.
Upstairs, the children shout, gleeful, voices pitched high. Sweetie laughs, delighted. And then a voice screams: Oh, my God! and begins to wail, and now Bit pictures a little girl finding the wings in the sill. He can see the delight fall off her face, her stricken expression when she understands that the fairies were smashed when the window fell.
No, a boy cries. No, no, no!
Bit’s heart is wrenched. He stands, agitated, would take it all away if he could.
Sweetie cries out, Nonsense. She lifts the window. Look! There’re no fairy bodies here! They just put their wings down to rest and we woke up before they could put them on again and fly away. I bet they’re hiding somewhere in this room, hoping we don’t look for them too carefully or else we’ll see them.
She leans out the window, and there’s a touch of menace to her voice when she says, In fact, I bet if we all go to breakfast really fast, they’ll be gone by the time we get back.
A torrent of little bodies passes through the courtyard in nightgowns and pajamas, into the Eatery. When they’re gone, Sweetie says to the air, I’d say the fairies have fifteen minutes to do their business. Then she, too, goes in. Cole whispers, Aw, don’t listen to my mom, she’s lame. But there is a flush on his perfect skin, tooth marks in his lips. Even Dylan looks ill.
This is awful, Bit says, near tears.
Ike says, Come on, Bit, man, it’s like the whole point of the Sowers of Destruction, to be mean. The little kids are ripe peaches of disillusionment, ready to be plucked. He laughs, awkward, his Adam’s apple dancing in his throat. Bit has to force himself to see the Helle in Ike so that he doesn’t hate his friend. He is alone when he slips in and gathers up the wings in his hands. He puts them into his pockets, where they burn during breakfast, then runs out to bury them in a hole deep in the forest, saying the loveliest words he can find to make it all better again.
Even this, he knows, may not be enough. Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.
Late June and the world bursts with greenery. Abe is throned in his chair, the center of a circle of boys on the ground under the oak in the courtyard. The other kids and Ados are scattered across the grass: Kaptain Amerika reading Chaucer with the older girls, Marlene leading four-year-olds through German numbers, Peter and Theo conversing like sages in Hebrew. It is Bit’s second meeting of the History of Revolutions Tutorial. State Lessons are over for the summer, and the Tutorial was Bit’s idea so that he could see his father every day, but to his surprise, eight other boys signed up on the bulletin board in the Eatery and are listening intently as Abe talks. Today, the theme is Satan. The mind is its own place, Abe says, and in itself can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. The apostate angel said that, Paradise Lost. The ur-rebel. Ike, what do you think?
Ike tries to answer, but his mind jitters off like a lizard when he thinks, and he is left with a handful of tail-thought. He says, Like, isn’t Satan just then building the big old palaces of Hades? Building his own place?
He is, Abe says. But that’s not what he means. Bit, go ahead.
Bit says, We make our own heavens and hells. He’s saying that things look bad but we can transform what they are by applying thought to our situations. When we are in hell, it’s our own fault. It seems like a kind of radical idea for the time Milton was writing because instead of putting faith in a God who predetermines everything, Satan is implying that we can be our own gods in a way. It’s privileging self-creation over being fated creatures who have no say in our destinies.
His heart pounds: he wants to follow his idea farther as it escapes through the grass, but Abe says, Good, good, and makes a motion with his fingers to slow Bit down for the others.
Cole says, face taut with confusion, Wait, but. Like, Satan says this and he’s bad? But we believe it, right? That people can create themselves. So what’s wrong with that?
Go on, Abe says.
For example, the Trippies, Cole says. I mean, we have to believe that they can make themselves better, or else we wouldn’t waste all the Minders’ time on them, right? And the whole idea of Arcadia. That civilization can be better if we just believe. Like the way Handy always says that we’re emanating light, and that light will touch the dark corners of the world and make them light, too. I mean, that George Eliot guy’s quote.
Go ahead, Abe says to Bit, eyes crinkling over his red beard.
Bit says, I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me . . . That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and can not do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower. And Eliot was a girl, he says. Cole flushes, then lobs an acorn at Bit that nails him in the temple, and they laugh, friends again.
Great, Abe says, and Bit feels a burst of pride. Then he finds a handful of humility and covers it over.
Abe says, Both Satan and Eliot are backing up the same sort of idea, that desiring change is a powerful way of making change; that change unfolds from this desire. Harrison, tell us what you think about what Satan says, in the light of our everyday lives.
That we are doing good by trying to do good? says Harrison. That our intention is what matters?
Intention matters, says Abe. But if you listen closely to both quotes, it’s not the only thing. In Eliot and in Milton’s Paradise Lost, there’s the idea of struggle, the attempt to act in order to make your heaven come to fruition. So push your thinking. Let’s use Arcadia as a case study. Think about how things are these days. Think about what you most desire to do differently, what doesn’t make sense, how we should act on our good intentions in the way we’re not right now. We’re not in hell, but we’re getting there. And this is from someone who used to head up the Sanitation Crew in the middle of summer before I broke my neck. Believe me, I do know hell.
The boys laugh, but there is a new tension between them, and when the laugh dies, they are suddenly shy. The wind picks up among the oak branches and waggles spots of light all over them. Okay, says Harrison, at last. He is the oldest boy in the Ado Unit, used to speaking up. I guess one thing is that we’re all supposed to be equal, and yet Handy is still our leader, making commands and things. It just doesn’t square to me. Why do we need a leader and the Council of Nine? Shouldn’t we all just democratically make up our own rules?
Yeah, says Dylan. Plus, he never works like everyone else. It’s like he’s the head Trippie or something.
Hey, says Ike so softly that only Bit hears him. Abe smiles. He says, Down with the king!
Abe’s blasphemy takes a moment to set in. When it does, things go still. Kaptain Amerika’s head stops, mid-swivel, mid-Chaucer. Caro unbends mid-stand from her French lesson, a bird is caught in a net made of air.
Ike sa
ys, You mean, my dad is, like, getting in the way of democracy?
Time snaps back. Three stories above, Handy’s head comes poking from his bedroom window. His jowls hang; his beard forks; he is uplit yellow by the sun reflected off the hard dirt below. Abe sees the boys looking and peers upward, his lips parting in a smile.
I’ll be right down, Handy calls out, and withdraws his head.
Oh, goody, Abe says, looking at his ring of boys.
They wait. A sour wave rises in Bit’s gut. Handy lopes out of the Eatery with his banjo in his arms, twiddling a mindless little tune, and when he comes to their group, he seems relaxed. He leans up against the tree, towering over them all. He finishes his song and puts the banjo on the ground. Abraham Stone, he says, in a voice that almost seems admiring. Fomenting discord. So openly, too. Nobody ever said you weren’t ballsy.
It’s a Tutorial, Handy, Abe says. I’m not fomenting anything.
Yes. You’re pure of purpose in all things, Handy says.
Perhaps I am, Abe says. Perhaps our purposes have diverged.
Perhaps you’re the one who has diverged, Handy says.
Perhaps, Abe says. But the converse is equally valid. That I have stayed anchored in our original aims and it’s Arcadia that has drifted.
Pretty, pretty, Handy says. Oh, you talk so pretty, Abe.
Yes, ad hominem, the defense of petty minds, Abe says.
Handy is pink around the nostrils. He smiles down at Abe, his gray eyetooth winking. He takes a few breaths and says in an exaggerated country accent, shaking his head sorrowfully, It is a sad sight, kids, the day a true believer loses his belief. Like a snake with his spine ripped out; all a sudden, he ain’t nothing but a worm.
