The Young World

by Chris Weitz

  Jefferson: “This way!” He pushes me out the doorway.

  He leads us through rooms with fabric walls, elegant wooden furniture, portraits of lords and ladies in petticoats and waistcoats. We can hear roaring and the groaning of metal behind us.

  And finally we come to a long hall, bright and airy, and there are gorgeous banners hanging from the ceiling. And in the middle of the hall there are armored knights on horseback, frozen in midstride, lances in hand.

  Jefferson takes his gun, casting his eyes around, then walks up to a glass case and smashes it open. He takes a round metal shield out and fits it onto his arm. Next to it is a sword, which he yanks from its housing. SeeThrough follows him and grabs a long dagger with her free hand.

  So we set to looting, arming up for the bear. Peter finds a sword that reaches up to his sternum. Brainbox takes a nasty-looking spear from the wall, and Kath gets an even nastier one with a sort of meat hook on the end. Me, I opt for a battle-ax.

  Which is what my father used to call my mother. So, shout-out to Mom.

  The bear lumbers around the corner, then rears up on its hind legs, massive square paws cocked toward its body. Its head is a good ten feet up, beady eyes gleaming down.

  Brainbox charges with his big iron spear and nails the thing in the shoulder. The bear twists around and swipes at the spear, which splinters right in the middle. Brainbox totters and falls, and the bear lunges for him, black lips drawing back from the wicked teeth, but SeeThrough jumps on him first, sinking her dagger into its humped back.

  Howling, the bear violently twists to the side and bites into SeeThrough’s injured arm. He swings her this way and that, making her look as light as a doll, and then throws her through the air. She smashes through glass and into the back wall of a case of arms.

  Peter raises his big-ass sword just as the bear’s front paws land on the ground again, and before he can connect, it has turned and slammed into him, and he’s down on the ground, yelling. McGee stabs at the bear as it tries to bite Peter, and I run up and bring my ax down on its shoulder. I feel the blade slice through flesh and bone.

  Blood goes everywhere. The bear sort of hollers, and I back up as it lurches toward me. I slip on some blood before I can get away. Up goes its paw, I see the yellow claws flexing out—

  And then Jefferson takes the swipe on his shield. He’s thrown back into a glass case, crashing through it into the wall.

  The bear pursues him and smashes again into the shield. Jefferson punches upward with his sword, and the point goes deep into the bear’s neck.

  But the damn thing won’t die. It clamps its teeth onto the edge of the shield and actually bends it, and I hear Jeff screaming as his arm, stuck in the clasps of the shield, starts to come out of its socket.

  Then Peter brings his sword down on the thing’s neck.

  And all I can say is somebody loved his job in the arms and armor department, because damn, the blade is sharp. The head comes clean off, still stuck on Jeff’s shield, the massive body of the bear falling to the side with a thump.

  Peter throws his sword to the floor and helps up Jeff from the case. They stand there leaning against each other, too tired to speak, as I fall to my knees, gasping.

  Quiet. We all lie there for a moment just listening to the hiss of the bear’s blood pooling on the floor.

  Then we turn to SeeThrough.

  Her breath is shallow. Her eyes are rolling up into her head. I take her wrist, and her pulse is high and irregular, like someone running panicked through a dark house.

  I pull SeeThrough’s shirt up to the sternum. There’s a jagged, angry wound near the bottom of her rib cage. A puncture from a shard of plate glass. It hisses and blood bubbles around it every time she takes a breath.

  Brainbox looks up at me. “Do something. Save her.”

  “I need a plastic bag.”

  Peter throws his pack to the ground and pulls a white plastic shopping bag out. He empties a pile of energy bars from it and hands me the bag. I cut a square of filmy plastic out of it.

  I tear some strips of silver tape off a roll from my bag and carefully edge the square of plastic with them, leaving one side untaped. With Brainbox’s help, I roll SeeThrough onto her back and then flatten the plastic over the wound.

  The plastic rises and falls with SeeThrough’s ragged breath, first inflating and then stopping up the hole. The hissing sound goes away.

  She’s not going to make it. The sucking chest wound has been stopped up—the lung may even be inflated—but she’s all broken inside, I can tell. Thank God she’s not conscious. She moans and grabs at air, and her chest rises like she’s trying to float out of here.

  Me: “Take her hand, Brainbox. Try to calm her down.” Then I look in his eyes. He sees that she’s not going to live.

  Suddenly she starts breathing fast, like she’s running a race. Then, a kind of sigh.

  Then, as lightly as a bird flying from a branch, she stops breathing.

  We take SeeThrough’s body through colored galleries, up wide stairways of shiny marble, along high balconies. Jefferson leads us to a corridor full of brush paintings and calligraphy, through a round doorway into a courtyard that looks like it’s part of an oldy-worldy Chinese mansion. The paned glass has cracked above, so little birds have built nests in the tiled roof. You can make out little bright pieces of plastic in the nests, but it doesn’t look like litter; it looks sweet and cheerful.

  We wash her face and hands with some water from a stagnant pool, and set her down on a low step under a pointy green roof.

  I kiss her on the forehead and tell her good-bye. Peter takes her hands and folds them over her stomach. He closes his eyes and prays to himself. Brainbox kneels down and leans his head against hers.

  Jefferson kneels with his feet folded under him. It’s a neat trick; like, no way could my legs take it. It looks like it’s genetic or something. We all try to do it, too, but end up Indian-style.

  He chants. It’s Japanese, I think, kind of monotonous and in the back of his throat. I guess it’s the equivalent of that part in movies where somebody says, “We should say something,” and then some dude will come up with something that is all Simple Yet Beautiful. This doesn’t sound simple, it sounds really complicated, and it makes me wonder if Jefferson went to Buddhist school the way some kids used to go to Hebrew school.

  It’s weird, because he’s Jeff and he’s not, like, somebody else is here, or part of him is somewhere else. Wherever it is, it looks less hectic than here. I feel like there’s all sorts of things about him I didn’t know—and then I realize that I don’t remember him doing this for Wash or anybody else, and I start to figure that he’s kind of still catching up on death. I don’t know, maybe he’s even throwing the Mole People in there, too. Sort of a mental mass grave.

  Meanwhile, everybody tries to act appropriate, and we end up just sort of holding our hands in our laps and looking around. I expect McGee to be checking her nails or something, but instead she’s staring at Jefferson like she’s trying to count up his pores, and despite the fact that this is SeeThrough’s funeral, I kind of want to punch her in the face.

  After a while, Jefferson stops chanting, claps his hands three times, and gets up. “Come on,” he says. We leave SeeThrough in peace. Everybody except for Brainbox. He holds her hand and stays for a long time after.

  CHAPTER 31

  SO I GOT her killed after all.

  I know there are all sorts of excuses, like she decided to come, we couldn’t keep her from it. But the fact is that if I hadn’t started this, SeeThrough would be safe at home in the Square.

  It’s not Brainbox’s fault. When he sees something broken, he wants to fix it. He’d probably rewire a defused bomb if the challenge was interesting enough. Seeing him like this, pretty much unhinged by the loss of his what—his girlfriend?—I realize that he had no idea of the consequences.

  And yeah, we’re all going to die anyway, so why not? But that was always the case, eve
n Before. Who could say they were going to live forever before It Happened? People just tried to keep their heads down and find something worthwhile to do, or tried, I don’t know, to stay entertained or something, and not to think about the end.

  So I decide to call a meeting to figure out what to do.

  “What are we talking about?” says Kath. I haven’t had time to explain everything to her.

  “Whether we’re going to save the world or not,” says Peter.

  “Oh,” says Kath. “Okay, count me in.”

  Donna sort of snorts. “Who asked you? You’re just some bitch from Uptown who got my friend killed.”

  “I saved your life,” says Kath. “All of you.”

  “Was that the part,” says Donna, “where you shanked some poor dude while his back was turned?”

  “He was reaching for his gun.”

  Donna snorts. “With what, his boner?”

  Then Brainbox says, “If she’s willing to take the same risks as us, she should come with us.” This puts an end to the argument since, somehow, Brainbox has become the custodian of SeeThrough’s legacy.

  “We can use all the help we can get,” I say. “Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. The question is, does everybody else want to keep going?”

  I look at Brainbox first. He nods. Peter looks over at Donna.

  “Jesus Christ,” she says. “Why do you keep asking us all the time?”

  “Because it’s your life,” I say.

  Donna snorts again.

  “Have you got a cold or something?” I ask. With maybe a little more animosity than I meant.

  “Jefferson, I said I’d go” is all she says. “Stop… questioning my resolve or whatever.”

  Peter says, “Have you ever played poker?”

  I’m confused. “No?”

  “Well,” he says, “there’s a point? A few cards into a hand? Where you’ve bet so much that it feels like it’d be crazy to fold up your hand and lose it all. It’s called being ‘pot committed.’ ”

  “So?” I ask.

  “So… I figure we’re pot committed. I mean, SeeThrough… Ratso… all the people who died… I can’t just turn tail and go home.”

  Yeah. That’s kind of it. “Only way out is through,” I say.

  Then Brainbox says, “Statistically, it shouldn’t matter how much you’ve already bet.” He looks up at us for the first time. “If you’ve got a bad hand and keep betting, you’re just going to lose more.”

  There’s an unspoken understanding that we’re not going to move today. Our bodies and our minds are empty.

  We parcel out SeeThrough’s food and eat. I can’t say that “she would want us to do it.” What does that mean anyway? If she’s up in heaven, she’s got other things on her mind. But this is the way it has to be.

  It’s the notebook that gets me. We’re going through her pack for anything useful, and some stationery with a cute little bug-eyed animal on the cover drops out. When I pick it up, the pages fall open, and I see, before I can stop myself seeing, the words friends and, surrounded by stars and hearts, boyfriend. In looping girl script, hearts above the i’s and everything.

  I pick the notebook up and hand it to Donna. She takes it and turns away, starting to cry.

  I take the others to the furniture galleries, and we hunt down a place to sleep. Everybody flops down, exhausted, but I don’t feel like resting.

  Instead, I go find my wakizashi. Then I take a long walk through the museum, looking for old friends.

  A lot of the smaller paintings are missing, along with pretty much anything made of gold. But the death of Socrates is still happening, Brueghel’s peasants are still lying down in the fields. The sun still shines on Vermeer’s girl with the water pitcher.

  I think how easy it would be to steal. Just take a knife to the edges and roll it up. Tack it over my bed like a poster when I get home. If I get home.

  Then I wonder what for. I know I’m supposed to think, This is the precious legacy of mankind or something. Somebody is supposed to think that. But right now nothing really seems to matter, least of all art. And I wonder why I am the way I am, what’s wrong with me, why did I ever care about these things instead of Jay Z or getting high?

  We’re nothing but animals.

  But I know I cared about SeeThrough. I care about what Brainbox is going through. I loved my brother.

  I loved Donna, I thought. Maybe I still do. But I don’t understand. How could what happened with Kath happen if I really do love Donna?

  Uh, maybe because Kath gave it up.

  All those things I’d spent so much time wanting and wondering about were just right there, like a bowl of candies on Halloween. Everything that was fraught and difficult and challenging with Donna. It was so easy.

  Or maybe Kath was so easy.

  As for me, well, I’m a boy. I was born easy.

  Maybe it was a onetime thing.

  Maybe Kath is really into me.

  Maybe I should make sure we preserve this place, so people remember what humans could do.

  Maybe I should burn it down and see if anybody cares.

  I’m in a dark interior gallery, looking at a still life of a skull, when I hear footsteps nearby.

  “Who is it?” I call out. Nothing.

  Then, just where I thought the sound wasn’t coming from, Kath emerges from the darkness.

  “Thank you,” she says. “For standing up for me.”

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  “I was lonely,” she says. Then, looking down, “No one back there likes me.”

  “That’s just… they’re just… not used to you,” I say. She actually doesn’t look very sad, or lonely.

  “Do you like me?” she says, reaching up and tugging on her hair.

  “Of course I do,” I say.

  “Prove it,” she says.

  “What do you want me to do?” I say, and she laughs. She lays her bag down on the floor.

  She pulls her shirt over her head.

  I clamp my hand over my headlamp. It doesn’t seem right to leave her exposed in the glare.

  I can’t think of anything cool to say. Instead, I say, “Kath, I feel like I should think about stuff—”

  “I feel like you shouldn’t,” she says, and kisses me. She’s pressing up against me. My heart is exploding.

  “Oh, thank you for standing up for me,” she says, smiling.

  I drop my things.

  The floor is not so hard, really. Not exactly a bed, but, you know, everything’s relative. Kath is soft and warm.

  “This reminds me of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” I say, and immediately regret that I did.

  “What?” says Kath.

  Just say nothing, says my brain to me, but instead I say, “It’s about this girl and her little brother who run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum.”

  “Oh,” says Kath. We lie there for a while as I consider how much of an idiot I am.

  “So what’s the plan, boss?” she says, twirling a piece of my hair around her finger.

  “The plan,” I say, “is to head uptown and east to the Triborough Bridge.”

  “We’ve got to get past Uptown territory,” she says. “Get out at the northeast corner of the park. Evan hates you. He and the others are gonna be after us.”

  “Who’s Evan?” I ask.

  “Evan led the expedition down to Washington Square,” she says.

  “The guy with the cheekbones? What’s so special about him?”

  “He’s…” She looks away.

  “He’s your boyfriend?” I ask.

  She laughs. Not a happy laugh.

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Your brother,” I say, after a long while.

  “I probably should have told you that earlier.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Now I can see it, of course.

  “Don’t feel bad,” she says. “He won’t be coming after me because he cares about me. He’ll b
e after me because he thinks he owns me. Him and his friends.”

  Her body gets tight.

  Him and his friends.

  “Why didn’t you run away?” I ask. Then I realize she is running away. “Sorry.”

  “Stop saying you’re sorry. You’re not, not really.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re no different from anybody else.”

  “I am,” I say.

  “No, you’re not,” she says. “People are scum.”

  Now I feel my own body tensing up. I shift a little, and she rolls over onto her side, facing away from me.

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re not like them. Maybe you’re different.”

  “I am different.” Lame.

  “Maybe,” she says. Then: “That girl Donna wants to do you.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” I say.

  She laughs. “Yes, she does. She’s all possessive of you.”

  I try to work out the validity of this claim. “I haven’t noticed.”

  “You’re a boy,” she says. “You’re totally clueless. She wants to get rid of me, and she wants to have you.”

  “No. She doesn’t. She could have. She didn’t want to.”

  “Ugh, there’s history?” She sits up. “All the good ones are taken. Oh, well.”

  And at that “oh, well,” so dismissive, a stab of feeling. A shard of loss where I thought I couldn’t feel any more.

  She gets up, grabs her clothes in a bunch, and walks off, just like that.

  “Where are you going?” I ask. But she doesn’t answer.

  After a while lying there, during which time I bang my head against the floor in self-judgment once or twice or three times, I get up and find my way back to the others.

  I half expect that Kath will have taken off, but when I get to the Italian bedroom with the crazy plasterwork and pink bed, she’s sitting on it, cleaning her feet with Handi Wipes she must have scavenged somewhere.

  Donna and Peter are sort of regarding her with disdain. I figure it’s because she’s effectively claimed the bed for herself, so I make what seems like a reasonable suggestion: “The girls should share the bed.”

  Donna levels her eyes at me. “You wish.”