by Andrew Smith
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CONTENTS
Part One: A Model of the World
The Breakfast Papers • The Sinking of the Titanic • Ingrid’s Bloody Nose • You Man in the Sky • Adam and Eve’s Drive-In Movie Theater • Things Like This Are Bound to Happen When You Put Poultry in Control • Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? • A Very Short Chapter About Fish and the Sea • Crazy People Should Never Be Allowed to Give Things Names • No Wonder We Came Down Here • A Sure Sign of Spring • A Chance Encounter with Bigfoot • The Night • The Question Superheroes Never Ask • A Ladder from Jupiter • The Exact Opposite of Stuck • In the Middle of a Disappearing Road • A Walmart Is a Place of Spirits • Leaving Miss Sour Eye, Entering Are Can Sass • The Library for Vegetables and Clothes • The One-Month Lifespan of an After-the-Hole Cicada • An Unfortunate Choice Outside Rebel Land • First Day in Cicada School • The Last Dance of the Year! • I Don’t Care About Houses • The Battle of Hampton Roads • This Isn’t How I Thought It Would Be • Lonely Thing in the Night • A Number 42 Midnight Special • Edsel and Mimi •
Part Two: All Stories Are True
Number 42 Breaks Every Rule • Two Notes and One Picture • The Church of the Screaming Stag • Fuckers from Space • Survival Gear • There Are Bound to Be Snakes • A Roof over Your Heads, and a Bucket • The Prisoners of Camp Sumter • The Clockwork, Mechanized Routine of a Haircut • The Three Sisters • The Machine in the Forest • Swimming and Not Drowning • Father Jude, the Sister Ladies, Joe, and the Attic in the Church • Hunting for Food in the Dixieland Bayous • I Only Want to Be a Human • Names on a Wall • Self-Portrait with Champagne • A Familiar Reaction • A Smoker’s Best Friend • In This Version of Adam and Eve • Camouflage Does Not Make You Invisible • The Black Car with the Shiny Treasure Chest • The African Queen • The Emperor of Bullshit •
Part Three: After the Hole
Self-Portrait with Shoreless Man • Toward Little Grace • This Is Even Better Than I Thought • The Lifeboat • On Civilization and Eggs • The Boy on a Boat Straddles Time • Keeping My Eyes Out for Hungry Leopards • An Optimist for a Librarian • Jumping on the Bed While the Ship Goes Down • A Shot in the Dark • Just Like a Scene from a Love Story • Journey on the Fish • Home to Me • Dobey’s Corners • Enough People for a Real Basketball Team • I Am Shoreless Man •
For Trevin and Chiara.
From the surface, I have dragged down bits and pieces for you.
Part One
A Model of the World
“The jury is undecided on humanity,” I said.
“How so?” the wild boy asked.
What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us.
—Max Beckmann
All stories are true the moment they are told.
Whether or not they continue to be true is up to the listener.
Like all self-portraits, this is a true story.
This is where I assemble, as a unit, everything I know.
It is filthy art, and pure as water; it is a model of all things that ever came before me, without end, constructed by the broken hands of someone who’d never been a firsthand witness to anything at all, to be honest, in his life.
It is all so futile, isn’t it?
The Breakfast Papers
I am my father’s son.
If there is one thing he gave me, it is this: Like my father, I have an endless fascination with putting things together.
One time—this happened about two months ago—he brought home a kind of puzzle for me. The puzzle had been sealed inside a large colorful box. The box said this on it:
THE VISIBLE MAN
SCIENCE ASSEMBLY PROJECT
After I put the puzzle together, I decided to name my visible man science assembly project Breakfast.
My grandmother, whose name is Wendy, was unhappy with the way I’d put together Breakfast, my visible man science assembly project.
Wendy was always so regimented and constrained.
She said, “Why don’t you follow the instructions?”
“You don’t need instructions if you know how to think” was my answer.
I didn’t even bother to consult the image of the visible man that had been printed on the cover of the box Breakfast came in. No matter. He wasn’t much of a man—visible or otherwise. He was missing some key parts, and anyone could see that, whether you looked at the instructions or not.
My father told me that science frequently regards modesty as being superior to truth.
But Wendy was angry because I’d glued Breakfast’s brain on top of his see-through head, as opposed to inside his skull, which is where anyone—instructions or not—would have naturally concluded a brain belonged. I also painted an extra set of eyes on Breakfast’s brain and affixed his lungs to his shoulders as though they were a pair of chubby pink wings.
Breakfast was arguably ugly, but he was mine.
Also, he infuriated Wendy, my grandmother, who was eternally attached to elaborate lists of rules and protocols.
I might explain the name I’d given my modestly edited visible man science assembly project. Breakfast was a real person, and he was out there somewhere. In many ways, I was obsessed with the idea that one day I would meet the real person named Breakfast. I frequently tried to imagine the feeling of meeting anyone else, especially a young person—a boy, someone like me—which is what my father and I concluded the real Breakfast was. I had never seen another human being—visible or otherwise—besides the people I’d lived with for my entire life.
Think about that!
Because it had been my understanding that everything people had decided for themselves to be real—and this was supported by accounts, without end, in stories, books (true and otherwise), paintings, and music—had all been a result of stitching together the collected experiences and emotions of the people around them, even if they were lies. And among the many things my father had brought home to me over the last few months was an odd assortment of artifacts he’d used in compiling a presumed history of this boy who was named Breakfast.
Father called these artifacts our Breakfast Papers, and, like me, Father wanted to find this person, if for no other reason than to validate Breakfast’s existence and to put to the test our assumptions about the boy’s life.
Maybe it was just a game—something my father made up to keep me entertained. Who knows?
Perhaps none of it was real, but, like the visible man science assembly project I named Breakfast, putting things together was something my father and I were both driven to do.
• • •
We lived inside a hole.
Naturally, I had nothing to compare our hole to. I had only on one occasion been anywhere else that wasn’t within very short walking—or sprinting—distance from the hole. But growing up here, and hearing the others talk about our hole as they did, I pieced together a picture that it was pretty nice and concluded that we were all very lucky, which is what my father liked to call me: Lucky.
Robby, my other dad, called me Arek, which is my real name.
So, after sixteen years and some days, I crawled up from our hole in the snow-covered ground. I was like one of those bugs—a cicada, which I have only seen in books from our library.
/> The books tell me that cicadas live for about seventeen years underground, and then, after they come up, they only live another month or so. Knowing that the upstairs part of their lives will only last a few weeks is probably what keeps them underground so long. In any event, it was not my intent that Mel and I would expire in a matter of weeks, but what can you do?
I grew up with Mel. She’s the only other person I know who’s basically been a human cicada. Mel and I were born in the hole. I also had powerful, unexplainable feelings about her—feelings that caused a sensation like something was growing inside my rib cage, trying to crawl out of me, like the plastic parts inside Breakfast, every time I even thought about her. Like now. But I would never have told Mel about that.
It would have been too weird.
I asked my father about the way Mel made me feel, how sometimes I couldn’t sleep thinking about her. It was times like these, when we would talk—especially about things that happen to boys when they are fifteen or sixteen—that my father’s eyes would turn into different kinds of eyes (I can’t explain this, having no context), and he would tell me about BEFORE THE HOLE and AFTER THE HOLE as though some clear demarcation existed, but it was invisible to me. I could only see the after.
My father could straddle time.
Near this place where we live there are three holes in the ground, surrounded by an immense accumulation of other artifacts from which I have constructed an understanding of the way things were before we got here. Before the hole.
The holes are in a field, flat and wide, located about two thousand steps from a house whose roof, according to my father’s account, had been sheared away by a tornado that struck just months after I was born. My father says the house is “historic,” but he says that about everything, without end.
He is probably right.
Everything is historic when you think about it—even things nobody would ever care about.
I ate pancakes this morning.
My socks tend to get dirty on the bottom, on account of the fact that I rarely wear shoes inside our hole.
My hair is the color of pale tea—just like my mother’s.
And the three holes look like this:
I have two fathers, one mother, and a grandmother.
I only pretend to remember who Johnny and Ingrid were—based on the things my family told me about them. I can’t remember a thing about Johnny and Ingrid, but sometimes, when I think about the holes, I make up my own stories about them.
The Sinking of the Titanic
In the library, with walls covered in layer upon layer of my father’s drawings, there is a painting called The Sinking of the Titanic.
The painting is enormous.
My father, who took the work from a museum in St. Louis, had cut the painting from its frame and rolled it up in order to get it down inside our hole.
There have been times when I sat and looked at that painting for hours, as though I were actually watching a terrifying story play out in front of my eyes.
The painting is the work of a man named Max Beckmann.
There is one other Beckmann painting in the library. I can’t describe it yet.
At times, it was all nearly too much for me: a place called St. Louis, museums, an ocean, and dozens and dozens of people struggling to save themselves against an unrelenting and unforgiving nature, without end. Think about it—all that chaos and disorder, everything without end being made all the more real by the experiences of the people huddled in small boats and others in the water. There was so much in that one painting for me to learn about the world before the hole. It was the things like Max Beckmann’s painting—all the art, the music, the books and books and books, without end, inside our hole—that made me feel like I needed to get out, away from my home.
My father, whose name is Austin, said this to me: “This picture shows everything about the way things have always been in the world.”
“Okay.”
“It says it all. You really don’t need anything else.”
“Oh.” I nodded as though I agreed—or at least understood—despite the fact that I’d never seen water deeper than could be held in the steel sink in our kitchen, where Amelie and I used to bathe together.
I believed that, in bringing all these things inside the hole, my father was attempting to make me feel as though I could see the outside, that I would be happy for the completeness of my world belowground—for not dealing with all the terrible things other humans had eternally suffered.
I think my father was like that; he only wanted to protect me from the way things had always been and keep me safe inside my jar, where nothing ever happened, and ships never sank. My mother carried her anger like a broken grand piano growing out from her chest.
If I ever constructed a visible mother science assembly project, that is how I would build her.
But even the painting of the sinking ship made me long to go out. Because no matter what my father told me, I could not believe that everything was in Beckmann’s painting. And this bothered me too, because I had come to realize, at sixteen years old, that I had crossed a point in my life where I no longer believed all of what my father told me, as though his words were no longer proof enough for me.
I needed to see things with my own eyes and touch them with my own hands.
I was sad about this. It was just before the last time he and Robby, my other father, left. I felt as though I was taking from my father, even though there was no such thing as stealing in our hole. Why would anyone steal from anyone here?
But I was stealing part of his world from him—the parts I would not allow him to put together for me, whether he had accurately followed instructions or not. I didn’t say anything about it to him, but he could tell. All fathers can tell these things about their sons; I am certain of it. I could see his eyes change, after all. I’m sure he saw mine change too.
And I was convinced that I should try my hardest to never be a father to a son.
“What’s wrong, Lucky?” my father asked me. It was the morning of the day when he and Robby were going to go outside to get things and bring them back, so they could continue assembling the world inside our hole.
We sat in the library together, in front of the big painting of the sinking ship and the terrible ocean.
My father smoked a cigarette.
Every time he would leave with Robby, my father’s eyes transformed into his before eyes. I can’t explain it, other than to conclude that all sons watch their fathers straddle time.
I think Max Beckmann went into a hole.
I think Max Beckmann painted The Sinking of the Titanic with his before eyes.
Ingrid’s Bloody Nose
Breakfast, the boy, was born in a place called Kansas City, which was inside another place called Missouri, that was inside another place, and another place, and another place, without end.
It was difficult for me to comprehend, despite the maps and drawings my father offered me. After all, the only place I had ever known was the hole. I could draw a map of how to get from the theater to my room, from the showers to the bowling alley, or to where Louis kept the chickens, but nothing bigger than this could accurately construct a model of my understanding of the actual world, or what the world was located inside of, which would be inside something else, and something else without end.
One time my other father, Robby, went up to the top at night. It was summer, which was not a good time to go outside.
Outside the hole, there were monsters. And Iowa.
Robby could be so daring and fearless at times, like nothing mattered.
If he had been on the Titanic, I think Robby would have sung and told jokes to the shivering people in the small, crowded lifeboats.
Robby brought me down a miracle.
This happened when I was thirteen, just around the same time things began changing inside me, and my chest, without warning, would ache for Mel. Thirteen was a bad year for me. My mother’s sadness and anger becam
e a stormy ocean inside the hole, drowning me, and I think Robby was only trying to make me happy.
Robby had trapped two insects in a jar, and when we brought them into my bedroom and shut the door so everything was dark, the insects floated in the air inside the jar and made little lights, like dancing balls of fire.
Robby told me the lights I saw there in the blackness of my bedroom were the ghosts of Johnny and Ingrid. He laughed.
And I constructed an episode from the past, before the hole, about Johnny and Ingrid. Of course accuracy was not an issue, since anything I put together would stand as the way things are, just like my visible man science assembly project.
Every story is true at the moment of its telling.
“Johnny and Ingrid were passengers aboard the Titanic,” I said. I pointed up, toward the ceiling of my room, as the two little blobs of light bounced like lifeboats on the sea. “Naturally, they survived the ordeal. Otherwise they would not be up there in those other holes.”
“Naturally,” Robby agreed.
“Ingrid was the star of the cruise. She had just come from Europe, where her cakes, pastries, and delicate cookies delighted royal families, militarists, radicals, writers, musicians, painters, and spies. Everyone on the ship wanted to be seen in her company, because Ingrid was so beautiful and charming, but Johnny wore Ingrid on his arm like dazzling human jewelry. They were inseparable, and also madly in love.”
“What does being in love feel like?” Robby asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Nobody explains it very well, not in any of the books I’ve read.”
“It’s because you should never use a word in its own definition,” Robby pointed out.
Robby was the smartest person I knew.
I continued. “Ingrid was prone to getting terrible bloody noses. She’d gotten one the night the Titanic ran into the iceberg that would end up sinking her. Ingrid thought it was very funny—the bloody-nose part, not the sinking and all the terror and stuff—but Johnny was embarrassed and mortified. Ingrid’s gown was streaked with slashing rakes of blood. If Johnny hadn’t taken her outside for air, and to escape the puzzled glances of the other passengers who were eating in the ship’s elegant restaurant, both of them might have gone to the bottom of the sea with the ship and so many other passengers. As it was, Ingrid’s bloody nose ended up being a sort of life preserver—as well as a ticket to a place called Iowa.”
