The Electric Kingdom

by David Arnold

  “Cinnamon doesn’t do anything.” Kit sank a little in his chair. Until now he’d managed to go the whole dinner without saying a word. “Our friends got carried off by Flies. We had cinnamon all over the place.”

  Bruno took a sip of water. “Au contraire, Little Man. Cinnamon is pretty effective against smaller swarms. Larger ones, not so much. Now, I wasn’t there when your friends got carried off, but I bet you guys killed some kind of animal that night. Lots of blood, yeah?”

  “The wild turkey,” said Lennon.

  Bruno nodded. “We Rainer boys don’t put too much stock in theories. We put our faith in God and in ourselves. Outside of that, faith becomes fantasy. For example, if I said I knew how the Flu operated, how it killed—that’d be fantasy. But, now, if I said I knew the Flies, understood what made them tick, how to control them, how they operated . . .”

  He stood, crossed the floor to a small closet beside one of the torches on the wall, pulled a key from his pocket, and unlocked the door.

  They heard the Flies first: in diminutive form, like a small sampling. Appropriate, considering that’s exactly what it was. From the closet, Bruno pulled out one end of a broom. On the other end, a clear plastic bag had been applied with a hefty amount of tape. The bag was alive, expanding and contracting, pushing and pulling, flailing in furious punches. “No need to worry,” said Bruno, eyeing the end of the broom as if it were a beloved pet. “I’ve spent time with this little business—and many before it—studying them, getting to know them. Another month or two, they’ll outgrow the bag. For now, you’re safe.”

  Outside, the forest was alive with invisible things, nighttime critters and near-winter winds and tree-siblings breathing staccato breaths, reaching out for one another, seeking touch. Nico listened for their words of comfort . . . We are here. You are not alone. She felt her place among them, felt them calling her home.

  We have to get out of here.

  “When we ran the planet, we went where we pleased, and whenever we damn well pleased, and not always with some urgent purpose.” Bruno spoke with a quiet resolution, as if talking himself off a ledge. “Flies enjoy that same privilege now. You might see giant swarms roaming aimlessly, you might not see one for weeks. Maybe you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now you’re dead. But there is one way to up those chances. Like sharks, Flies are drawn to blood. The smell alone is enough to make them crazy. You can roll the dice, hunt smaller animals. Might go days hunting without seeing a swarm. But it just takes once. And so no—we don’t fuck with meat in Waterford. We don’t fuck with blood any more than we have to.”

  With great care, as with some ancient relic of the church, Bruno gently placed the broom back in the closet with a soft “Amen.” And as he inserted the key into the padlock, turned it with a metallic click, Nico noticed it was the same lock used on the trapdoor in the corner, the one leading down into the catacombs. And suddenly, the low frequency humming under her feet took on frightening new possibilities.

  Theologies

  If one were to crawl under the Farmhouse, strike a match, and look around, that person would see that the roots of the house were sunk deep into the intersection of science and faith. “I’m not saying I definitely don’t believe in God,” her father said one night. “Just that there’s no empirical evidence to support the theory.”

  Nico remembered it clearly. It was a Delivery Day. They’d taken four Metallyte pouches of chili mac, tossed in boiled corn and a packet of something called taco seasoning. So far as Nico was concerned, if it was empirical evidence of God her father was looking for, he need look no further than his own plate.

  “Okay, two things. First”—her mom paused; whereas her dad let loose every word that came to mind, content to sift and reorder afterward, her mother let words build up inside, carefully choosing the ones best suited to her purposes—“if there were empirical evidence of God, it wouldn’t be called faith. I see God in the starry sky. The snow and rain, the books in our library. I see God in my snowstorm girl. In our survival.”

  This particular conversation was more like a very long book, which her parents never finished, only dog-eared when they were tired of reading. It rarely felt like an argument; the further in they got, the wider their smiles became. Their tones were calm, loving, tender—sometimes to a fault, in Nico’s opinion. Her mother would talk of God, her father would talk of science, and the looks in their eyes would turn to a fervent sort of hunger, just as the nausea in her own stomach roiled.

  Her parents were the only two people in the history of the world for whom debating the existence of God conjured romantic sparks.

  “And second?” asked her father, eyes alight.

  Her mother’s smile grew, and at first Nico thought it was for all the usual nauseating reasons. “If not God,” said her mom, “then where did it come from?”

  Under the table, Harriet whined.

  “Where did what come from?” Nico asked.

  Her mother continued, as if Nico hadn’t said a word. “Have you considered the possibility—”

  “No.”

  “—that God put it there? As a way out? That maybe He placed each and every Tollbooth strategically around the world to save humanity from itself? Maybe Tollbooth is the wrong nomenclature. Maybe . . . Ark . . . would be better.”

  “Uh, okay.” Even the miracle of taco seasoning took a back seat to whatever was going on. “What are you guys talking about?” asked Nico. “What tollbooth? Like from the book?”

  Her father wiped his mouth, set down his napkin, stared at her mother across the table. “There was a time when humans looked at the aurora borealis and thought it was a window to heaven,” he said. “Throughout history, ambiguous elements of fantasy are eventually proven to be anything but fantastic. Science wins the day, every time.”

  Ambiguous elements of fantasy? Aside from his stories, Nico had never heard her father speak like this.

  “You call it ambiguous,” said her mother. “I call it divine.”

  “The Tollbooth has nothing to do with divinity, believe me.”

  “Careful. That sounded dangerously close to an absolute.”

  “Okay.” Nico dropped her fork on her plate. “You guys are freaking me out.”

  The silence that followed drowned out everything. And then: “Believe it or not,” said her mom, “the idea of houseflies wiping out the world’s population once sounded like pure fantasy. But that’s not the only fantasy that—”

  A throat clear from across the table; that was all it took to put a stopper in the sentence. Carefully chosen words or not, her dad clearly didn’t approve.

  But the stopper didn’t hold.

  “Before the Flies came, your father and a group of scientists—”

  “Honey.”

  “—found something.”

  “Not yet. Please.”

  Her mother’s eyes dimmed; she returned to her food.

  “Well, you can’t stop there,” Nico said. “What did they find?”

  The dinner table, the library, the attic deck, hunched over the radio in the cellar: through the years, every corner of the Farmhouse had played host to mysterious conversations. Sometimes her parents would hand her a piece of the puzzle, though it was rarely a corner or edge; and so she was left with a splotchy and incomplete view of her own world.

  The older she got, the more questions she had: What had her father found? Had fantasy and reality somehow evolved to coexist? Were the secrets of the universe bound up by God or science, and did it have to be binary? In arguing for one over the other, weren’t her parents reducing the size of their own respective faiths? Nico often asked these questions, and many others, alone on the attic deck, her back to the panoramic view.

  The Bell was stable, present, loyal. In its shadow, she felt understood.

  That night, over chili mac with corn and taco seasoni
ng, Nico didn’t care about feeling understood—she wanted to understand. But she was years away from her eighteenth birthday; Harriet was alive, Harry not yet born, her mother was a spiritual sprite with cheeks the color of the rainbow. Nico’s life was small but intact.

  “I want to know,” she said, wishing for a bigger world.

  Her father put a hand on her arm. “I’m not saying never. I’m saying not yet.”

  Being treated like an outsider was bad enough. But that it should come from this man who’d never babied her, always trusted her, only made it worse. As she got older, and the not yets piled up, she was better able to articulate this incongruence. For a rational man, she would think, it’s his most irrational belief: that survival is only possible when the kid is kept in the dark.

  THE DELIVERER

  If my math is right, I’ve experienced just under three thousand winters.

  Summers, falls, springs, just as many of those. But winter, when the year reaches a crotchety old age, bitter and cold and too tired to care—what a fucking headache.

  I stand in the middle of the street, staring at the church, feeling this particular winter in the deeper parts of my soul. “I could do something.”

  I really could.

  According to the Red Books, I have tried.

  In my 11th Life, I completely ignored the task at hand. Instead of giving the rifle away, I carried it across the street, opened the door to the church, and took fate into my own hands.

  Fate, as it turned out, would not be handled.

  The following Life, I was a little smarter. I arrived in town a day early, set up in the woods, and waited. Something about that decision changed their course; the group never showed.

  I tried again in my 13th Life. Smarter. Earlier. More prepared. Again, they never showed.

  I’ve broken every rule, taken every turn, told them everything, told them nothing. Sixteen times, I’ve tried to stop tonight’s events from happening, and sixteen times I have failed, each failure further confirmation that to live by the Law of Peripheral Adjustments is to accept the curse of the middle domino: you are a means to an end you will never see.

  I turn away from the church to face the saddest-looking house on the block. All chipped paint and rotted wood, heavy locks on doors, bars on every window. Eager to be rid of the rifle in my hands, I walk to the front door, set to work picking the lock. I remind myself that this is action, and while the middle domino may cause little destruction, the final domino is nothing without it.

  KIT

  goliath

  The broom changed things.

  Bruno took his seat at the table, asked if they would like a refill of water, like he hadn’t just wielded death itself. Lennon said no, they were fine, thank you, but they weren’t fine. And even as they tried to hide it, Kit felt a new weight in the air. Things were heavier, slowed down, as if the whole church had been immersed in a lake.

  It was Lennon who finally broke the silence. “We should get going. Don’t want to overstay our welcome. Thanks for the food, it was—”

  “Lennon.” What little light had lived in Bruno’s face was gone. He was the unplugged lamp, sad and dusty and broken. “Len-non,” he said again, as if chewing the name, debating its taste and texture. “You know—ever since you introduced yourself, I’ve been thinking about your name. I have to say, I would have pegged you as more of a Rashid. Or Samir, maybe.”

  Kit had read of superheroes who could shoot bolts of lightning from their eyes, which he’d always found sort of silly. But there was nothing silly about the bolts of lightning in Lennon’s eyes right now.

  Bruno continued: “I assume your parents had a deep respect for the greatest American band of all time, it’s just—difficult to imagine respect for the Beatles coming from . . . Pakistan? Lebanon?”

  Voices came to Kit from miles and days away: in a sad, dusty nursery, So long as there are people on Earth, there will be willful ignorance and hatred; on a baseball field, searching for the perfect stick, Doors had been closed to them based on who they were, where they’d come from.

  “Not like you picked the name,” said Bruno. “Or like you could be expected to know anything about the Beatles. I just think a parent has a duty to consider their own history—”

  “Winston,” said Lennon.

  A beat.

  “Sorry?”

  “John Lennon’s middle name. But you probably already knew that.”

  Bruno’s smile was still there, but it was different, strained.

  Lennon went on. “After Yoko came along, he tried to change it to Ono, but something about the law wouldn’t let him drop the Winston, so he just wound up adding Ono to the mix. John Winston Ono Lennon. Born October 9, 1940, with three names. Shot and killed December 8, 1980, with four. But again, I’m sure you already knew all this. The children’s book he wanted to write, the UFO he claimed to have seen, how he signed an autograph for his assassin the morning of his assassination. I’m sure you’ve read about how dissatisfied he was with his own work, how of all the songs he wrote, he was only happy with a single lyric. I’m sure, given your deep respect for the Beatles, you know which lyric I’m referring to . . . ?”

  Lennon waited a beat; Bruno said nothing.

  “My parents—not that it’s any of your business—were Jordanian immigrants. The women who raised me told me my mom made a killer mansaf, that my dad preferred his knafeh with ground pistachios, that they’d rigged a camping trailer to the back of their Subaru, and that they loved the Beatles. I have no way of knowing how deep their respect was, but I’m guessing it was deep enough to know the Beatles were a British band, not American, you smug motherfucker.”

  Kit knew of the word. Which is to say, he knew it existed. He had no idea how it could burst from the mouth like a little explosion, lighting up the room with thunder and muscle.

  “We’re leaving now.” Lennon stood—and just as he did, there was a zip, a loud crack against the mural wall behind him, little chunks of painted stone crumbling to the ground.

  “Gabe must be feeling generous,” said Bruno. “He doesn’t miss unless he means to, and he never means to twice. I would sit down now.”

  Slowly, eyes on the woods, Lennon sat.

  “That was a real nice little speech you just gave,” said Bruno. “Left me all warm and fuzzy inside. Allow me to return the favor. You know the Bible story of David and Goliath? Kid takes down a giant with nothing but a slingshot. I always found that hard to swallow. But I get it now.” Bruno turned, gazed into the dark woods. “I never was much of a shot. But Gabe always liked the sport of it. Real determination, even when he was little. Once we learned about the Flies’ thirst for blood, we ditched the rifles. Mostly ate what we grew. I figured, weapon-wise, we were left with our bare hands, but—my boy had other ideas. Started with a little Y-shaped stick and a thin rubber band. Before long, the stick got thicker, the band got wider, and the rocks flew faster. He tinkered with different designs before finding the right one. Named it Goliath. Very clever, my boy. See, unlike a bullet, a rock isn’t aerodynamically designed to tear through flesh. Oh, it’ll enter the body easily enough, but depending on where you hit”—he leaned back, put both hands on his lower abdomen—“gut shots, namely—it’s rare for the rock to exit the other side. You’ll bleed some, sure. But in the right spot, with no exit wound, it’s minimal.”

  “What do you want?” asked Nico.

  “The answer to that is a different Bible story.” Bruno took a sip; afterward, he kept his eyes on the glass, as if talking to the water. “‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ It is our sacred duty to repopulate the earth,” and as he spoke, Kit heard the words in his head before they came out of Bruno’s mouth, so the man seemed only an echo of himself.

  Nico will stay here . . .

  “Nico will stay here . . .”

  . . . to help my son accomplish this.


  “. . . to help my son accomplish this.”

  He heard Lennon’s words in his head too: Fuck you, no one’s staying . . . “Fuck you, no one’s staying in this madhouse.”

  Bruno reached behind his head, removed the band holding his ponytail in place, and let his hair fall in sheets around him. “‘Replenish the earth, and subdue it,’” he said, digging both hands into his head, scratching like an animal. “‘Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’” As he pulled his hair back into a ponytail again, for the first time, it seemed the man’s face was his own, a mask removed. He pointed to the locked closet. “For all the shit we pin on Flu-flies, no living thing has been more fruitful, or multiplied at such phenomenal rates. We can learn from them, but only when we realize we have nothing to fear. They are doing what God created them to do. As are we.”

  “I’m not staying here.” Nico’s voice was a quiet-fierce. “None of us are. We each have somewhere to be because of someone we love.”

  “We’re not staying here,” said Lennon.

  “We’re not staying here,” said Kit.

  Bruno laughed. “You guys are cute. Sticking together, power of friendship.”

  “We’re family,” said Kit.

  “Yes, we are.” Nico pulled a large knife out from under the table, turned it to Bruno. “And we’re not staying here.”

  Bruno pointed to the knife. “That’s a big fucking mistake, right there.”

  “Funny, I thought it was a big fucking knife.”

  “I don’t think you know how to use that.”

  “Tell Gabe to stand down, or you’re going to find out.”

  He looked from the knife to Nico. “Lineage is everything—”

  “You’re creepy as hell. Tell Gabe to stand down.”

  “—without it, the world becomes a dark place.”