by Andrew Smith
So I drove.
I turned the opposite direction on Highway 20 from where we’d gone that day I learned how to drive—away from Clear Lake. I knew where I wanted to look first, to try to find what I’d found that day three years earlier.
I wanted to find my father.
In the dark, I drove through the little town where Robby and my dad were boys—a place called Ealing. It was much as I had imagined, but many of the homes there had burned down or collapsed from weather and the weight of all that emptiness, I suppose.
It was just like they told me it would be.
I turned the van down a street called Kimber Drive. I had heard the name so many times throughout my life inside the hole. This was where my father had a job when he was sixteen years old, in a little store in a row of buildings whose windows were all broken out, all the doors smashed in. I didn’t get out of the van. I didn’t want to look around the town too much. It was a sad, dead place.
It made me feel like that other Max Beckmann painting.
It was just like they told me it would be.
Past the town, I started feeling too sleepy to drive. So I parked the van in the roadway, took off my shoes, my shirt, and pants, and climbed into the bed. I covered myself with two sleeping bags.
The dark and quiet were new kinds of dark and quiet that I must say possessed an endlessness, a depth, that I had never considered. It felt as though I were on the Titanic, staring down into the swirling sea, without end.
I turned on the television and put one of the discs into a slot on the player beside my bed.
A program about something called Bigfoot came on.
“Bigfoot” is the generic name for a monster that was rumored to live in several forested areas in what used to be the United States of America. The show seemed to imply that the monster actually did exist, but that human beings had generally been too ill prepared or stupid to accurately document its existence.
At one point in the program, eerie whistling noises howled from the speakers while the screen showed the jittery image of a dense pine forest at dusk.
Over the reverberating howls, the narrator said, “Whether or not you believe it, you are listening to true recordings of Bigfoot creatures in their natural environment. . . .”
It was very frightening.
I wanted to shut the program off, but I was afraid I would hear Bigfoot howling outside the van. I didn’t know what to do.
So I let the program continue playing, but I covered my face beneath the sleeping bags. I kept telling myself, how could I ever find my father if I was too afraid to be out here only an hour or so after leaving the hole?
I tried to not think about going back, and how nobody would even know that I’d gone away if I returned before morning. But going back was all I could think about, until I heard something moving, and then all I could think about was Bigfoot getting inside my van.
A clicking sound, like a door opening.
I tried to remember if I’d locked all the doors—counting in my head how many ways in or out of the van there were—and I was certain I had not secured all of them. I didn’t even know how many ways in or out there were.
Something that was not me moved inside the van.
“Arek?”
And hearing that, I screamed.
I had never screamed from fear in my life. The feeling was simultaneously exhilarating and profoundly sickening. Beneath it all, I held on to a glimmer of hope that Bigfoot would be as frightened by Arek Andrzej Szczerba’s noises as Arek Andrzej Szczerba was of his.
Whether or not you believe it, you are listening to true recordings of Bigfoot creatures in their natural environment. . . .
And then I realized the voice that had called my name did not belong to a cryptozoological monster; it belonged to Mel. She had been hiding inside the Mercedes’s small bathroom.
For a moment I couldn’t say anything. My throat had frozen in fear.
“Arek?” Mel repeated.
Of course she couldn’t see me. I was hiding beneath two sleeping bags.
Finally, I uncovered my face. “What are you doing here?”
I was a little bit angry, and embarrassed, too. But I was also overwhelmingly happy that I was not alone, and that Mel was not Bigfoot, and that she was here with me, away from the hole.
“I’m sorry if I scared you. I didn’t know what to do, and I was tired of waiting for the right time to let you know I was here,” Mel explained.
Amelie Sing Brees definitely did not pick the right time to let me know she was here, unless by “right time” she meant whenever it would most likely cause me to scream and nearly pee in my bed, which is something I hadn’t done since I was maybe four years old.
Peeing in your bed is no way to start off your first night as an independent adult.
In truth, I did not want to be an independent adult.
“People—Wendy, my mother, your mom and dad—are going to be very mad about this,” I said.
Mel stood in the doorway to the Mercedes’s coffin-size bathroom. The light from the television made her seem like a shadow. Bigfoot stopped howling. The image on the screen was a grainy and quaking film clip of a Bigfoot monster walking through a forest.
“My parents won’t be mad. But Wendy and Shannon will, for sure. They’re going to be very mad at you, Arek,” Mel pointed out.
She was probably right. Connie and Louis were not like Wendy and Shann. Mel’s mom and dad didn’t carry around their anger and disappointment like overstuffed suitcases they clunked into everyone else’s shins. Connie and Louis were always happy, always okay with the way things were.
“We should go back,” I said. “I should take you back home.”
“You can’t just make me go back,” Mel said.
I thought about how I’d told her earlier that day that Wendy and my mother couldn’t make me do anything unless I wanted to. And now here Mel was, saying the same thing to me.
Nobody should ever make anyone do something.
“Well, what are we going to do, then?” I said.
“We’re going to find your dad and my brother. That’s what we’re going to do.”
The Night
Memory is a funny thing. It tells the story over and over; it edits and reshapes the scene, color, angle, and sound.
It is not static, motionless, like a painting of a sinking ship.
It is a last glimpse I had of my father sitting in the passenger seat of an uninteresting white car as he and Robby pulled away from us in the frozen and jangling beauty of a brilliant blue Iowa afternoon. It was February—not that it mattered—a few days after I’d turned sixteen.
When I calculate such things, I estimate that my father taught me 95 percent of everything I know. Here is one thing I know, and I concluded it on my own: It was time for me to leave our home and look for him.
• • •
That second Max Beckmann painting Dad kept inside the library—the one with the family under assault at the hands of the three cruel intruders—is called The Night.
Let me tell you about the first night Mel and I spent away from the hole.
It was awful.
For me, it could easily have been a Max Beckmann after-the-hole painting.
First it began with my feeling inhibited and embarrassed in front of Mel. I had never felt inhibited or embarrassed about anything in my life. It was almost as though I were straddling time—like Dad could—and becoming a before-the-hole human being, with all the agonizing hang-ups and self-doubt.
I didn’t know what to do.
I gulped a few times, and Mel and I just looked at each other dumbly. I was convinced each of us was trying to figure out what the next step in this awkward dance was going to be.
Let me tell you how frustrating this was. All my life there had never been anything I wanted more than to be somewhere alone—protected against intruders—with Mel. And now that I was in such a place, I was terrified. I felt weak, inadequate, and I wanted Mel
to ask me to go back home to the hole, which I certainly would have done.
I began to sweat.
Mel said, “Are you all right, Arek? You’re sweaty.”
I mopped my palm through my hair and pushed aside the sleeping bags.
I got out of the bed.
On the television, a man was holding up plaster models of enormous footprints.
I was dressed in the red long underwear and wool socks Dad and Robby had given me when I was thirteen. It all still fit. I hadn’t gotten much taller, and I generally resented wearing our in-the-hole white-and-blue outfits, which, naturally, made Wendy upset. My grandmother was afraid, I think, that as I got older I would challenge all the order she had crafted for everyone in the hole. This fear of hers was probably correct.
Now that I was out of the hole, I was never going to wear an Eden jumpsuit again.
We would need to search for new clothes for Mel, too, so I wouldn’t have to look at her dressed up like she didn’t belong here above the surface, so she could, like me, become something else.
We were cicadas—except I was the only sixteen-year-old.
Mel was fifteen when we left the hole.
I took a deep breath.
“I’ll sleep over there,” I said. “You can have the big bed.”
I tossed one of my sleeping bags onto the smaller, narrow bed that served as a sofa, beneath the motorhome’s side window.
Mel said, “No. You don’t need to do that.”
And I thought about all the possibilities that could result from not changing my sleeping place. I thought about Amelie Sing Brees making me sleep next to her in the big bed while we watched the program about Bigfoot together.
But Mel said, “I’ll take the small bed.”
The knot in my throat dropped like a sack full of bowling balls.
“Oh. Okay. Thanks. Um. Mel.”
I watched as she slipped off her shoes and stretched out under the sleeping bag. I wanted to tell her she should take off that Eden jumpsuit but was not prepared to honestly tell her why.
And she said, “Good night, Arek. What are you watching?”
The Question Superheroes Never Ask
We watched the entire program together. It terrified me, but when it was over and I turned the television off, Mel yawned and said, “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen, Arek.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Me too.”
I decided I would look for happier discs if I was ever going to watch television with Mel again in the future, maybe smarter ones too.
I couldn’t sleep. My heart pounded, and I didn’t understand what it was trying to say to me—if it was struggling to decide whether or not we should go back to the hole or, maybe, wondering what made Mel think it was a good idea to stow away on this ship that was destined to sink.
But mostly I couldn’t sleep because I was straining to listen to Mel. The lull of her breathing as she slept was like a song to me. Like Robby—and like Connie, their mother—Amelie Sing Brees seemed to float above everything with an attitude of comfortable wonder. I wished I could be more like that.
And that night, as I lay there listening to Mel’s breathing, the wind came.
I had never in my life heard wind blowing in the darkness of night. Think of it—all these new and eternally ancient things outside the hole, without end. It was almost too much, and it was frightening, too. At first the wind made soft whistles as it slashed itself open on the edges of our van. But soon the wind came screaming over us with such force the Mercedes shook and shook.
I got out of bed.
Mel was still asleep.
“Mel?”
She opened her eyes. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
I kneeled beside her bed and leaned my face over hers. It was so cold inside the van my breath made wisps of smoke, just like it did when I’d stand inside the kitchen’s freezer room in the hole. “Listen.”
She moved. The sleeping bag rose and fell. I wished I could be that bag, covering her, keeping her warm.
Mel said, “What is it?”
“Whether or not you believe it, you are listening to the actual sound of Iowa wind in its natural environment.”
“Oh.”
Mel closed her eyes. Her shoulders relaxed.
“Well, I was just checking to see if you were scared or anything,” I said.
“Not really. Are you?”
The van shook. The wind howled, without end.
I was scared.
“Of course not.”
It was so frustrating.
I stood up and cupped my hands around my eyes and then pressed my face against the window so I could look outside the van. I was half convinced I’d see an army of Bigfoot monsters, preparing to invade.
Outside it was snowing.
I did not think Bigfoots would come out in such a snowfall, so in many ways I felt a sense of relief. And although I’d seen snow falling before, since the only times I was ever technically allowed out of the hole were very brief in duration, in the daytime, and also in the middle of winter, I had never seen such a storm, in the howling wind and in the dead of night.
Snow blew in great gray-white blobs parallel to the ground, smearing across my vision. It made me feel dizzy, as though we were speeding forward uncontrollably, heading for an inevitable cliff.
It was dreadful. I had never before been so convinced I had made a mistake, never before felt so convinced that I was going to die, and very soon, too.
And I thought, What if I’m wrong?
My father had told me a story about this question one time, during one of my many lessons on before-the-hole history.
Dad drew comics. I’d seen all of them, I think. Many of them went all the way back to the time when he was my age, even younger, when he was struggling with all these conflicting feelings he had about Shannon—my mother—Robby, his school, church, family, the town he lived in, and how all these things connected to, and tugged relentlessly on, his life.
I loved my father’s comics.
When he and Robby went out on their scavenging runs, my father almost always brought back some comic books to keep in the library in our hole.
“Do you know what I learned about these guys in comic books, Lucky?” my dad had asked me.
“No. What?”
We’d been sitting beside each other, our knees touching on the floor of the library, looking at a comic book. I can’t remember the exact name of it, but it was about a very powerful man in a very colorful outfit, and he was capable of the most outlandish feats.
Dad said, “It was an incredibly American thing, you know, both inside the stories and in the real world—the idea of the superhero. He was the guy who could destroy anyone and anything, and he was always absolutely convinced—beyond question—that he was right.”
“Oh.”
“And you know what they never did, Arek? Superheroes never once would ask themselves, What if I’m wrong?”
There was so much I could never understand about what it must have been like to be a before-the-hole human being. I sometimes thought my father had made it all up—all the murders and war and cruelty and inhibitions and destruction, without end—as a kind of entertainment. The movies we saw were like that, but Dad, Robby, Wendy, and the others always pointed out specific details for me and Mel and told us, yes, that’s really the way things used to be.
And I said, “It must be nice to never consider the possibility you’ve made a mistake. Like math practice.”
My father taught me math. I was awful at it.
“It’s worse than that,” he told me. “It’s a monster. Thinking like that will eat you alive. It ate my mother. And my father, and my brother, whose names are your name.”
I watched my father, straddling time as he was, and his eyes changed when he told me that.
What if I’m wrong?
So, as I looked out at the snow, shivering not just from the cold, asking myself that same question, I realized I was
not much of a superhero—or American, for that matter.
“It’s snowing,” I said.
Mel shot up in her bed. “It is?”
I never knew so many things. Like, I never knew Mel was excited by snow.
She pressed her face up against the window. I could almost feel something—an energy—radiating from her and into me through the cold glass.
Mel said, “Can we go out?”
Amelie Sing Brees was incredible.
Arek Andrzej Szczerba was horrified at the thought of going out into the dark and wind.
“Why?”
“I want to see what it feels like,” Mel answered.
“But there could be . . . things . . . out there.”
Mel laughed at me. “Are you serious?”
I cleared my throat. “Yes. Yes, I am serious. Um. Mel.”
She laughed again. Then she slid her legs out from beneath the covers and put on her shoes. “Well, you can wait for me by the door, then. I’m going out.”
I inhaled deeply and stood there, dumbstruck, watching Mel open the door and step out into the whirling rush of the infinite world.
After she shut the door behind her, I whispered, “What if I’m wrong about this?”
Then, frustrated beyond what I had assumed were reasonable limits, I jammed my feet into my unlaced boots, pressed the hunter’s cap Dad and Robby had given me snug over my hair and ears, and, dressed in nothing more than a set of red long underwear, followed Amelie out into the snowstorm.
A Ladder from Jupiter
We were new humans, as alien to the world as if we had just climbed down a ladder from Jupiter.
Mel ran through the snow, laughing.
And before I could even catch up to her, I was covered in white flakes that stuck to me everywhere.
“Isn’t it amazing, Arek? Isn’t this beautiful?”
It was everything, all in one freezing half minute, without end.
“It’s cold, Mel. We should go back inside.”
