by Andrew Smith
There were also human bones littered around the base of the camp’s walls. Breakfast did not ask the crazy old couple if the bones were real.
In one corner of the room was a box constructed of wood planks and steel strap bars. Above the door on the box was a crudely painted sign that looked like this:
Mimi pushed open the door.
Edsel said, “Go on. Get in there. It ain’t much, but at least it’s a roof over your heads, and they’s some rags on the floor to sleep on. Ha-ha!”
“I need to make shit,” Breakfast said.
Edsel pushed Breakfast through the doorway. “That’s what the bucket’s for. Ha-ha-ha!”
The door slammed shut.
Breakfast and Olive were locked inside the Hole.
The Prisoners of Camp Sumter
“Don’t worry, Olive. They ain’t smarter than us. They ain’t stronger, and you know what? They ain’t wilder, neither. We’ll figure out something, girl.”
When Mimi and Edsel left the room called Camp Sumter, they shut the door behind them, and Breakfast and Olive found themselves smothered in complete darkness. They could see nothing at all.
Breakfast sat against the steel slat bars of the cage with his arm around Olive, who trembled and pressed her face into the side of the boy’s neck.
“It might take a while, but if we try hard and do what they want every day, then I figure they’ll start to like us more, and eventually they’ll forget to pay attention when they should be paying attention. That’s when we’ll go. You just have to wait and be nice, and be ready for when I tell you.”
Olive whimpered a little.
“I promise they ain’t going to eat you, girl, or me, neither. I can get them plenty of other stuff to eat, and you can help too. But, damn, I’ve never seen people so wicked and cruel as this. And here we’ve come all this time thinking the biggest monsters was those big fucking bugs, and now look at this mess we got into—and all because our truck was filled with shit. Think about that.”
Olive put her hand in Breakfast’s dreadlocks and twirled them gently.
“I don’t really need to make shit, if that’s what you’re thinking. I was just saying that to see what they’d do. I did pee under the table when they were eating, though. Serves them right.”
Breakfast picked his nose.
“You know what, Olive? I’m wild, that’s what. Wild and rich. So fuck those two old motherfucker poor people. I never been in a cage in my life, and I’m not planning on staying put in this one a second longer than we have to. We can do this, Olive. We can do it. I never let you down, and you never let me down, and you know why?”
Olive knew why, but, being a chimpanzee, Olive didn’t say it.
“Because we’re wild, girl. Rich and wild. Nobody wants to mess with someone as wild as us.”
Breakfast, being the wild boy he was, knew he would not easily go to sleep in the cage that night. He stood up and felt his way around each side, measuring, counting each metal slat that held them in.
He was particularly attentive to the door. He traced along its edge slowly with his index finger, which was as good as an eye to the boy when he was doing things like hunting for fish in a deep lake. Breakfast studied the hinges, which were recklessly turned inside. The Hole was never meant to be an actual prison, and with the right implements, Breakfast would be able to break out of it in under a minute.
“Come here, Olive,” Breakfast said. “Let’s see if you can’t get your finger up inside this and push up on the pin.”
Breakfast guided Olive’s hand to the underside of the lower hinge, but he could feel right away that her fingers were chubbier than his and could not move the hinge pin up. They needed something stiff and narrow to do the job.
“We need to find something like a stick, Olive. Something smaller than our fingers. If we could just push it up a bit, I could pry it the rest of the way with my hands. You know why? I bet you do. Because I’m strong. Wild and strong.”
Breakfast and Olive swept every inch of the floor with their palms, trying to find anything that could serve as a tool to force up the pins on the door hinges. They found the rags that were supposed to be their bedding, and the bucket toilet, which was empty and had no handle.
Olive began to bounce excitedly when her hand brushed into a small scattering of rat bones. One of them had to be just the thing Breakfast was looking for.
“What is it, girl?”
Olive gathered up some of the bones and grabbed Breakfast’s hand. She turned his palm up and opened the boy’s fingers, then placed the bones into Breakfast’s hand.
“Hoo-wee! Olive, you are magic! I could kiss you!”
Breakfast hugged Olive, and she kissed him with curled and slobber-slick lips, squarely over his nose and mouth.
“You’re a good girl, Olive! A lifesaver!”
Olive jumped up and down. She grabbed the bars on the top of the cage and swung, dangling her legs joyfully.
Breakfast took his rat-bone toolkit to the door and began working on the hinges. The pins gave way easily, and within moments the little wild boy had the door disassembled. Olive clapped and rubbed Breakfast’s back.
“We have to think about this, girl,” Breakfast said. “We don’t really know how to get out without going back the way we came, right into those crazy old people. Now we know we can do it, so let’s wait and see what we can learn tomorrow. We have to be safe. I don’t want either one of us getting shot by that man with the pictures on his skin. But, hoo-wee, we know we can do it. Let’s put the door back on and go lay down and try to rest, and talk about tomorrow.”
So Breakfast put the door back on its frame, and then peed out through the slatted bars on his cage.
He said, “Fuck this place. I never want to come to Rebel Land ever again. Who would ever?”
Breakfast picked his nose and scratched his balls.
Then he lay down beside Olive, atop the rags on the dusty floor, and thought about his future.
The Clockwork, Mechanized Routine of a Haircut
When I lived in the hole, every three weeks Connie Brees, who was Robby and Mel’s mother, gave me haircuts in the barbershop there.
Although Connie stopped giving me baths when I was eleven, the haircuts, which were events I always looked forward to, continued regularly. I thought about those haircuts frequently after I left the hole. For one thing, my hair was getting longer, and I preferred to keep it short on the sides and back. And I also thought about them because I kept coming back to what my father—Austin—had told me about feeling guilty, which was something I didn’t truly understand.
There was so much more out here that confused me now.
I do know this: I would never have allowed Wendy to cut my hair. The thought of being alone in that small and surgical space, nearly bound to my chair beneath a clean white sheet while Wendy displayed an array of sharp and gleaming cutting implements was the stuff of my deepest adolescent nightmares.
The last time Connie cut my hair was just after my sixteenth birthday. My fathers were gone, and I’d been acting like the personification of an after-the-hole Max Beckmann painting. I was sick of everything, haunted by ghosts that weren’t there, and miserable. I don’t even know why Connie asked me if I’d like to have my hair cut—I was so unpleasant.
But I think it had something to do with the fact that of all our family of survivors who’d endured more than sixteen years in the hole, Connie Brees was the only one who’d had experience with raising a teenage boy. Maybe that gave her some extra capacity for tolerance, or perhaps a natural immunity against the torment a teenage boy’s body inflicts on his brain.
Maybe Connie could look at me and see my Breakfast—my visible man science assembly project—as me, with my brain outside my skull, and my body, like a Max Beckmann figure, distorted and in disarray.
So I walked with Connie to the barbershop of the hole, which was next door to our laundry facility. Mel was folding clothes she piled on a stainless-st
eel counter beside one of the dryers. I saw a pink bra and some pale blue panties there, and my eyes stuck on them for a good few seconds. I took a deep breath, hoping I could smell her fresh-laundry smell, wondering what it would be like to help her fold her things.
Connie ducked her head in the laundromat’s doorway.
“Hey, babe. I’m giving Arek a haircut next door. Stop by when you’re done.”
Mel’s eyes paused on mine, but only for a moment.
It was a moment, though.
“Okay, Mom. See you in a bit,” Mel said.
And Connie said, “Love you.”
The shop had three steel-and-red-vinyl barber chairs that faced a wall-length mirror, and behind them, against the opposite wall, sat another row of chairs with domes that went down over your head to dry your hair. At the back of the shop were three low sinks with U-shaped lips on them so you could sit back and rest your head while someone else washed your hair.
That was where haircuts always started.
I unzipped the top of my stupid Eden Project jumpsuit and pulled it down past my shoulders, while Connie folded a towel that would be a pillow on the lip of the sink. Then I leaned back, and she turned on the cool water and showered it through my hair.
I watched her. I tried to imagine all the things she knew, everything Connie Brees had gone through in her life before the hole, and I wondered if Amelie would grow up to be as beautiful as her mother. Connie combed her fingers through my hair. Her breasts swayed, full and heavy, just above me.
That’s how it always happened.
Connie Brees could have been a Siren, an iceberg, and I was helpless on this sea.
She turned off the water and grabbed a bottle of shampoo. The shampoo, which was older than I was, was supposed to smell like kiwi fruit. I had no idea what kiwi fruit was, but the shampoo did smell good.
Then Connie said, “You have such nice hair, Arek.”
She always said that.
I said, “Thank you.”
I always said that, too.
She scrubbed and rinsed, then smeared conditioner in my hair. The conditioner looked like semen. It made me feel strange when Connie put it in my hair, because I always wondered if she thought it looked like semen too. She probably did, I thought.
So it was always this kind of clockwork, mechanized routine: the same lines recited, me watching Connie’s breasts while she washed my hair, the conditioner making me think about semen. But that last time we did this, when she was rinsing the semen-conditioner out of my hair, Connie looked straight into my eyes and said, “It hurts when your dads go away, doesn’t it?”
And, as usual, thinking about Connie Brees’s fingers and watching her breasts move, I’d been getting an erection until exactly that moment.
I swallowed. “I— Yes. It does.”
I closed my eyes. I could feel goddamned tears forming in the corners of them. I could feel Connie’s thumbs wipe them. She kissed my forehead.
“I know, baby. I know exactly how it hurts for you. Robby’s dad went away too, when he was just a boy.”
“All dads go away,” I said.
“What is it with you boys? You just can’t stay put, can you?”
I didn’t know if that was a rhetorical question or not. I kept my eyes shut. Connie put a towel over my head and massaged my hair with it.
I said, “Louis seems happy here.”
“Maybe Louis went away enough in his life.” She pulled the towel away from my hair and softly wiped my face with it. It felt so nice. And Connie put her hand on my bare chest and said, “Come on. To the chair, Arek.”
She always said that, too.
I sat down, and Connie pinned a sheet around my neck. She always knew how to do it with the perfect amount of tightness so it felt safe, like a hug. Her face was right next to my ear; I could hear and feel her breathing.
She said, “You should start shaving soon.”
“Really?”
“All boys start shaving in Iowa by the time they’re your age.”
“We’re not really in Iowa,” I pointed out. “I don’t even know what Iowa is.”
Connie opened a cabinet under the counter below the mirror. She did not usually do that. When she stood up, she had a big folding straight razor in her hand. Even though it was Connie, I was still a little bit frightened by the thing.
She said, “I’m going to give you a shave, Arek. For your birthday.”
“As long as you promise not to circumcise me,” I said.
“Where did you ever get that idea?”
“Wendy wanted to do it. When I was eleven. I was so scared.”
Connie said, “Oh. Well. Wendy’s kind of . . . um. Fucking insane.”
I was so relieved, and not just because Connie would never do something like circumcise me, but because she thought Wendy was fucking crazy, which was something nobody else in the hole ever said out loud. I took a deep breath. I said, “Wendy is already talking about what we’re going to do next Christmas.”
“Fuckbucket. Somebody’s going to end up dead.”
Connie made a soapy foam in a porcelain cup and used a soft brush, like a painter, to lather the foam on my face. It felt like I was being licked. Then she swiped the razor down from the top of my ear and traced along the curve of my jaw toward my chin. It was exhilarating. It felt electrical, like being naked in the bath with Amelie.
I imagined with each swipe of the razor that my skin was peeling away to expose the Arek who was underneath the exterior I’d been hiding behind for sixteen years.
Connie followed the same track on the other side.
Then Connie said, “You want to go away too, don’t you?”
I didn’t know what to say. Was it that obvious? I almost felt as though I had been unmasked in a lie, which was something I never did in the hole, where there was no reason to ever lie about anything. I waited until Connie paused to wipe the razor clean. I didn’t want her to cut my face off if I moved my mouth to talk.
I said, “I hate it here. I went out one time, and if I can ever go out again, I would not come back.”
“You know what’s funny?” Connie said.
“What?”
“Hold still.”
I didn’t think holding still was funny, but I didn’t think anything was funny at that moment in my life. Connie grabbed the top of my head and tilted it to the side so she could shave my neck.
She said, “What’s funny is I totally get that. I can see you hate it here. Just be careful, and know that we will miss you, and we all love you.”
The thread was cut.
“Even Wendy?”
Connie finished shaving me, not that there was anything missing on my face afterward. Still, it felt very nice.
She said, “Yes. Even Wendy.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, then.”
Connie picked up the scissors and began clipping the hair at the front of my head.
She always started there.
“Connie?”
“Yep, kiddo?”
“Why did some people turn dark down here, and then others—you, Louis, my dads—why did they hold on to the good parts of who they were from before the hole?”
Connie stopped snipping and sighed. “You ask tough questions, kiddo. I don’t know if I have the answer for you.”
Maybe it was just a rhetorical question. Maybe Connie did not need to articulate an answer for me, because even at sixteen I knew enough to realize the answer was about love, and about rules, too.
The Three Sisters
“Today is Mel’s sixteenth birthday,” Connie said.
Connie Brees quietly considered the length of the lifetime her daughter had spent belowground. It didn’t feel like sixteen years had passed to Connie.
Shannon Collins, who spun the thread of my life, and Wendy McKeon, the measurer of all things, thought about time too, but they calculated it on darker calendars than Connie did. Shannon and her mother couldn’t remember what things
were like before the hole, where they had spent an eternity that felt immensely longer than sixteen years.
The hole sank into a fog of semiconsciousness after all the departures.
Occasionally Wendy would check. Most days she’d simply tell Shannon to climb the ladder and take a look, to peek outside and see if there was any sign the missing had come back home to Eden.
Near the hatch, the ladder and the circular walls of the entry chamber were stained with soot from Christmas.
Shannon, who wordlessly resented her mother’s manipulations, made her way down from the ladder and said, “It’s not like they’d just wait out there for someone to open up and tell them to come inside.”
In the library, our Max Beckmann book sat open to a full-plate glossy image of a painting called The Three Sisters. I was the one who left the book like that before I went away. The painting always reminded me of Wendy, Connie, and my mother.
To me, the painting straddles time before and after a hole, between the wars that tore Beckmann’s Germany apart. In some ways, The Three Sisters was like the smoke-stained hatch leading in and out, straddling before and after; but I believe it is simultaneously Max Beckmann’s depiction of the Fates.
Like so many of Beckmann’s paintings, the perspective of The Three Sisters feels cramped and twisted. We see the women in the scene through a half-open window, like we’re playing the part of Beckmann’s intruders, only offscreen this time. The three women are sitting on a terrace, and the only one of them who seems amused, or even slightly happy, is the woman I imagine to be Connie, who cuts my hair, the one who cut my thread and told me it was okay for me to go away. When I hold the painting in the right spot, it looks as though Connie sees me standing inside the window watching her, and she is smiling at me. Maybe she’s smiling because she is ignoring the other two women in the painting. Connie was always good at ignoring Wendy and Shannon. But maybe she’s smiling because she’s holding something that looks like a giant fish.
