22
Sony was breathing heavily, his face both calm and stricken at once. Hai picked his glasses from the gravel and put them on, the taped left arm completely broken off. He wobbled back to his feet and studied his cousin, the mole under his eye, as if for the first time.
“The fuck was that? You can’t hit me. You’re autistic.”
“I’m sorry, I had to make a statement.”
“Yeah, and people usually do that with words.” He spat on the ground and touched his cut lip. “And what do you mean you know? What the hell do you know?”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Answer the question.”
“I’m not an idiot, Hai. My dad died three years, seven months, and fourteen days ago. He burned up inside his ’98 Nissan Maxima. I read all about it online. They even have a printout of the article at the group home in my file. They declared his death due to misadventure. I didn’t know people can die on adventures. I didn’t know,” he stopped and swallowed, “that smoking a cigarette by the side of a road was considered an adventure. But now it’s my turn to go on my own adventure. To see him at last, after all these years.” He straightened up, puffed out his chest, and saluted. “This is Private Sony Minh Le of the Seventeenth Connecticut Volunteers reporting for duty.” His bottom lip was quivering.
Hai had the sudden urge to grab him and steal the poor delusional boy away from himself. But he took a breath and tried again. “You can do all this later, okay? Your mom is scared shitless for her little soldier—who’s very brave, of course. We all know that.”
“Finders keepers, liars weepers. And she shouldn’t have lied anyway.” Sony removed his HomeMarket hat and flung it into the brush. He then took from his apron pocket the Union cap and pulled it over his eyes. “Besides, I have to get the diamond.” The diamond trapped inside his father’s hand from the explosion in Vietnam. A diamond that size, the size of a pea, Sony explained, would be worth over two thousand dollars. “There’s this quantum theory I’ve been looking into,” he went on, “specifically something called the Golden Triangle. It’s in Heroes, you know—have you watched it yet? Never mind. It posits that my dad is still alive somewhere. And if I enact myself finding his diamond, I can introduce a line of action into the universe wherein I can eventually go see him the moment his car ignites—but in a parallel dimension, of course, which will eventually ripple back to this one and alter the course—”
“You’re finally insane.” Hai wiped his bloody lip.
“Not yet.”
“There’s no way the car will still be there. It’s been years. And why didn’t you go before, right after it happened?”
“The letters started coming.” He looked away and whimpered. “And I just…I kinda went along with it.”
“Let’s just go home for today. You can sleep with me at Grazina’s. We’ll watch Gettysburg again all you want. We’ll stop at CVS and I’ll get Goldfish, a family-size box and everything.” He reached out but Sony pulled back and Hai flinched. “Don’t hit me again. I’m high and can’t really see straight.”
“Diamonds are forever,” Sony said softly, caressing the spot on the back of his hand where the diamond was on his father’s. “BJ told me that. A diamond can survive a fire. She told me that when I started. No one gave me a job cause of my brain problems, but she did. She believed in me.” His eyelids flickered. “She said, Anybody can become a diamond. All they need is a bit of pressure.”
“Please…”
“A soldier—” Sony winced and corrected himself. “A career soldier needs a foundation of courage, duty, and sacrifice.”
“But you don’t need that crap. It’s just bullshit the commercials say to convince you to go to war. Let me tell you something, okay?” Hai glanced back at the tracks to make sure a train wasn’t coming. “You say I’m so smart, right? Cause I went to college and all that? Then listen to me.” He put both hands on Sony’s shoulders. “Most people are soft and scared. They’re fucking mushy. We are a mushy species. You talk to anybody for more than half an hour and you realize everything they do is a sham to keep themselves from falling apart. From prison guards to teachers, to managers, psychiatrists, even fathers, anybody—even your stupid generals. People put on this facade of strength. They act like they have a purpose and a mission and their whole life is supposed to lead to this grand fucking thesis of who they are. But what happened, huh? Robert E. Lee sent all those people who believed in him across a half mile of hell because he was too scared to say he fucked up and had no cavalry. His generals told him to fall back to the mountains, but he wouldn’t listen. You told me that, right?”
“He also had dysentery,” Sony mumbled.
Hai clutched Sony’s shoulders, as if steering a ship. “They’re just scared somebody will look at them bad and judge ’em. Scared somebody will see through the fake-ass armor they’ve wasted their whole lives building. And for what? To have fucking dysentery while a bunch of people who think you’re some god walk into a wall of bullets? Don’t you see it? We all want some story to make it bearable so we can keep living long enough to work our asses off until we’re in the ground, like Grandma. Like your dad. Like…” Hai sucked on his bloody lip. “Look, being fucked up is actually what’s most common. It’s the majority of who we are, what everybody is. Fucked up is the most normal thing in the world. You’re both fucked up and you’re normal, got it?” He searched Sony’s face to see what his words were doing, not sure if he even believed them himself. How come every time he said anything important, it felt like it was coming from somewhere else, from a cesspool collected from shitty movies at the base of his skull?
“Everyone’s scared,” Hai continued. “It’s just like those stupid corn breads we give out every day. They all have this thin golden-brown crust, but ninety-nine percent of those things are just soft, mushy cake with a shit ton of sugar. So you don’t have to be anybody’s soldier. You can be a person doing what you do every day and that’s fucking enough. Don’t you get it?” He was nearly doubled over now, his arms still on Sony’s shoulders, catching his breath, then pushed on.
“People aren’t so bad. They’re just wounded little kids trying to heal. And that makes them tell each other stupid stories,” he said softly. “Would you just stand in your skin with me and stay? Just for a bit, while I sort this out? Will you stay? Please? I can’t do this anymore.”
Sony reached up and touched the brass bugle on his cap.
“You’re so much better than me, Sony. That’s the truth. I look up to you. You’re, like, the goodest person I know. You’re Alyosha.” Hai’s bottom lip was doing something weird, and he had to put his fist over his mouth to steady it. He looked at the boy’s face as if waiting for a dice to finish rolling. “You’re still gonna fucking go, aren’t you?”
Sony swayed side to side, then stopped, gave Hai this mournful, sheepish look, and nodded.
Hai took a long look down the tracks, at the new spring heat rising weakly over the iron ties, enough to warp the faraway bits of East Gladness into a mutilated dream. “Alright.” He bit his lip, his head hung in defeat. He was in too deep and had to follow through now. “Let’s go to Vermont, then. How bad’s my mouth, out of ten?” He turned to show the side where Sony hit him.
“Six,” Sony said, and shifted his eyes to the ground. “Sorry.”
Hai picked up the bike and nodded over his shoulder at the pegs. “Get on, Private. The Union’s not gonna save itself.”
If they were going to cross state lines, he had to bring Grazina with them. Too risky to leave her alone in her current state. The trip also had the added benefit of dodging social services if they ever came back, buying them time.
Maureen’s car was in the shop, so they decided to try Wayne, the only other employee who owned a car. BJ never had a car and was dropped off each day by her mom.
“Hold on a minute,” said Wayne. “You’re both going to Vermont to look for a pea-sized diamond that was jammed inside his daddy’s hand?” He adjusted his cap and scratched his chin.
They were deliberating by the dumpster out back. BJ was pondering the ground, brainstorming. Hai was surprised at how readily she agreed to help with what sounded like a near mythical quest.
“Would you drive if we covered gas?” Hai said to Wayne. “And throw a little on top of that?”
“So, let me get this straight. You want me to drive you two and pick up some demented white lady you’ve been living with this whole time and go to Vermont to look through burnt dirt for a lost diamond to free this boy’s mama from jail?” He put his hand on Sony’s shoulder and squeezed. “I respect what you’re going through and all, I do. But I’m not gonna be Morgan Freeman in Miss Daisy driving around crazies when I got bills to pay. Plus, I’m already driving five hours to see my girlfriend in Lancaster this weekend. I love you all. But I’m sorry, my guy.”
“What’s Miss Daisy?” Sony said.
“Okay, I got it.” BJ clasped her hands under her chin and eyed the cousins. “Here’s what I’m going to do for you. And it’s just cause that douchebag fired you without my consent.” Her nails had been bitten down to the nub. “If I put in for a pickup of creamed spinach—which we do need—at that HomeMarket rest stop outside Thetford, then I can authorize the use of the catering van and keep us on the clock during store hours.” It was a bit past three p.m., and Thetford was only two and a half hours away and just north of where Sony’s dad was. “We’d be back before closing.”
“Thank goodness. Alright, chicken’s not carving itself.” Wayne headed inside. Just then Maureen came out the back door.
“What’s going on? Half the store’s out here.”
“What’s going on is you’re going to Vermont,” said BJ.
“Delivery?”
“Sort of,” Hai said.
“I’m gonna be in the van with him,” BJ pointed to Sony, who saluted her, “and him, who’s supposed to be babysitting some crazy landlord. Don’t ask. I need somebody to make sure we don’t become another one of those unsolved mysteries around here. Plus, it’s on the clock. You in?”
Maureen shrugged. “Beats standing around on my jacked-up knees.”
“Get your coat and meet me out here in five. And tell Russia and dishwasher girl to load those cooler bins in the van with ice.” She gave Hai a double take. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I got punched in the face.”
Half hour later they pulled into the driveway at 16 Hubbard. “Back in a sec,” Hai shouted as he ran inside.
Grazina was sitting on the La-Z-Boy watching The Young and the Restless. “Labas, you get that new pizza from your restaurant today?”
“No, but I can get you some tomorrow. Hey,” he came over and held her hand in both of his, “we have to go on a little trip, okay?”
“Really?” Her eyes widened. “To see Lucas and Clara again? Aren’t they a nice couple?” She was woozy from her dose of Zoloft.
Hai reminded her about his cousin Sony and said they were going to go up to Vermont to see his dad for a very important occasion. “It’ll be nice. Vermont has all these pretty trees.”
“Not till May it doesn’t. I did go there years ago, to a Lithuanian music camp. Mountains, biggest I’ve ever seen.” She gestured at them like they were across the room.
“Great, so you know what I’m talking about.” He started packing their things, filling her plastic medicine organizer and adding a few extra pills in case. He took some Pop-Tarts and a bottle of water, grabbed a blanket from the couch, and stuffed them all in his backpack. Then he got Grazina dressed. “Here, your favorite owl sweater.” He put it over her head and helped her into it, then fetched her Woolrich chore coat from the sunroom, buttoned her up, and wrapped her head with a scarf. “Good, you got your glasses? Where are your glasses?”
Grazina stared at him, blinking. “I dunno—oh! In microwave.”
“What?”
“I was making tea.”
“Okay, hold on.” He grabbed the glasses from inside the microwave and put them on her face. “There, you ready? Good.”
When they climbed in the car, Maureen glanced back, surprised that this landlady actually existed. After everyone shared hellos and snapped on their seat belts, the van started chugging down the potholed roads. BJ was driving, Maureen up front, Sony alone in the middle, and Hai and Grazina in the back, all of them huddled together like some ghoulish family vacation.
Hai stared out at the river rushing by, the waves swollen and globular, the water higher now with the upstream thaw. It felt good to sit and look out a window, to be driven somewhere and float over the blasted landscape he’d known for so many months only by bicycle.
Grazina seemed lucid enough for now. Hai noticed her being more self-conscious lately, offering sanguine smiles when a thought fell away from her mid-sentence. “You alright?” he asked her as the van merged onto the interstate. She shrugged and pushed her glasses up her nose and stared out the window. Once in a while BJ would glance at them, half expecting Hai to explain their situation.
“This is just like Star Wars.” Maureen giggled from up front. “I swear it’s like that all the time now.”
“What do you mean?” said BJ.
“Well, you got a kid trying to get some jewel from his dead dad. Sorry, hun,” she said to Sony. “It’s kinda epic, don’t you think? Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, a cosmic quest to save Princess Leia trapped in the state pen—all that stuff.” She sighed and checked the time on her dead Han Solo watch. “It’s a beautiful thing. A kid looking for his people.”
“Long as we keep it more Star Wars and less like Die Hard 2.” BJ gave Maureen a look, then glanced at Hai through the rearview. “I’m just saying, this is kind of wild. What if this old-ass lady dies in this van or something? What am I—and you know it’s gonna be me—what am I gonna say to headquarters?”
“She’s not gonna die,” Hai said from the back. “She just has memory issues. You don’t die that way.”
“Oh! How lovely!” Grazina suddenly sat up. “Why don’t we keep talking like I’m not here. Like I’m meat on a hook. How nice, huh? I’m not slow, you know. My brain is just on and off.” She looked over to Hai, stunned at her own brashness.
He squeezed her hand.
The van was quiet for a bit. When they crossed state lines, and made steady distance through the country roads north, BJ cut the silence. “Hey, guys, actually, can I ask you something—you know, since I’m driving anyway and risking my career, my livelihood and all?”
“Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet.” Maureen turned to her. “We’re already past the airport.”
“I just wanna try this one thing…I promise, it won’t be too much trouble. It’s just—” She paused to think.
“Just say it,” Maureen said. “Didn’t know lesbians beat around the bush so much.” She looked around and cackled, realizing her own joke.
“So I know this guy Kenny. His cousin’s a scout up in Toronto—you know, Canada, Bret Hart country. Anyway, you all cool if I stop by and drop off my tape? He’s a couple miles ahead in Springfield.”
“We’re trying to get a secret diamond and you wanna network?” Maureen said.
“You should do it.” Sony poked his head around BJ’s seat. “You deserve this. We can knock two thirds with one stone.”
“Two birds,” Grazina said to Hai, gladdened by her ability to correct this.
BJ took the tape from her coat pocket and held it up. “I’m gonna make this worth it. Don’t worry.”
“This was your plan the whole time, huh?” Maureen said with wry admiration.
BJ grinned as she veered off the ramp toward the Springfield exit. The city’s ramshackle skyline rose from the horizon, ambered from the afternoon light. “Whoa! This is where half the rifles were made for the Union Army. That’s why it was called the Springfield rifle.” Sony pressed his face against the glass, as if someone on the street might be spotted carrying one of the rifles.
“Like I said,” Maureen picked at her nose and watched the city come into view, “everything is Star Wars.”
They parked in the lot of the Cracker Barrel where Kenny worked as a server, and were now waiting for him to come out during his break. “See that place over there?” BJ pointed across the street to the Blue Chickie, a regional chain. “I heard one time, down in Virginia, one of their workers had a heart attack, right? And they were so slammed they just dragged this dude into the walk-in fridge and left him there till the shift was over. Like, two employees just laid him down and went back to work.”
“Damn,” said Maureen. “He die?”
“Must have.”
“Pepto-Bismol,” Grazina mumbled. She’d been so quiet her voice sounded new in the van.
“What’s that, ma’am?” Maureen turned around. “You need something?”
“It’s Italian for ‘abysmal,’ ” Grazina said. She turned to Hai. “We waiting for the boy’s father now?”
“We’re waiting for BJ’s friend. It’s a pit stop.”
“A what?”
“A pit stop,” BJ said. “And he’s not my friend. I barely know the dude.”
But this “stop” turned into an hour of sitting in the lot before a dumpy guy in a grease-stained apron finally came scuttling up to the van and took BJ’s tape. “No promises,” Kenny said with a blank face, “but I’ll see what I can do.” BJ pumped her fist as she watched him go back inside, the tape bulging from his back pocket. “One small step for mankind, one giant leap for pro wrestling.”
Hai watched the Blue Chickie sign spin on its axis as the van lurched back on the road, and thought about that man in Virginia, lying very still on the floor of the walk-in fridge, his soul hovering above him waiting for his shift to end so he could go home. For some reason this reminded him of those emperor hogs, so named not to signify the act of ruling—but to feed the ruler with their lives.
The sun had plummeted into the horizon, making peach-red smears over the hills. The dash clock read 7:01 p.m. Grazina was dipping in and out of sleep. In the van filled with the warmth of bodies, the chilly April night seeping through the windows, Hai let the glass hold up his head and watched the scraps of light across the fields from shanty houses, gas stations, and half-lit strip malls morph into blobs of color as the window began to fog.
After a few miles BJ pulled into a motel off the interstate. “Where are we?” Sony asked, rubbing his eyes.
“Sign back there said Nowhere, Massachusetts,” said Grazina, pulling the scarf around her head.
“Northampton, Massachusetts,” said BJ, getting out.
“Says no vacancy, hun,” Maureen sighed.
“I’m gonna ask anyway.”
“Why are we here? Brattleboro is only an hour away.” Sony turned around to Hai.
“Yeah, and what diamond are you going to find in the dark?”
BJ’s demo drop-off had pushed them back, and the stars were already shivering above them.
“I brought a flashlight.” Sony took out what looked like a Swiss Army knife contraption and, pressing a button on it, lit a beam of light the size of a toothpick.
“We gotta wait till tomorrow,” Maureen said. “Plus, my knees are dying.”
Maureen saw a flicker of worry on Sony’s face and reassured him that they’d make it first thing in the morning just as BJ came out from the office in a huff.
“They’re full,” she said, getting in. “Lady said there’s some sort of festival to celebrate asparagus. Apparently it packs the town every year for the whole damn weekend. Whitest shit I’ve heard of in a while, that’s for sure.” She stared at the motel marquee. “But I called Wayne to clock us all out. He’ll clock us back in tomorrow when he’s in.”
“Are there any Stouffer’s?” Grazina said. “I’m starving.”
“I could go for some Hooters wings,” Maureen said. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if they had a Hooters but it’s all grandmas over fifty-five?”
“I’d go,” BJ said, looking for the gearshift.
They chugged down the road to another motel, and when that one was also full, the crew stopped at a 7-Eleven for snacks and gas. Maureen got a roll of scratch-off lottery tickets. Then they drove a bit further, BJ sipping a slushy while a bag of Cheetos was passed around.
“I can’t sit in here much longer,” Maureen said finally. Everyone agreed they had to stop for the night—but where? They were debating whether it’d make sense to drive all the way home and just try again early the next day when Hai spotted something in the distance ahead.
It was a barn, unlit and alone in a vast field. Having worked on tobacco farms through his teenage years, he knew the shape and feel, the clean edges, the looming frame, of these sheds that littered pastures all along the Connecticut River Valley, and could spot them even in the dark, like living creatures slumbering across the landscape. He knew, too, that most farmers lived several miles from their barns, some even hours away, and that it was likely idle enough to stay the night.
They agreed to stop at the dirt drive just to regroup and think, but when Grazina opened the door and started wandering toward it, they all left the van and followed her in.
“When I was girl,” Grazina said, stepping into the barn’s cool dark, “I used to sleep in a barn like this, in summertime. At Baba’s house in Bubiai.” She scanned the rafters. Light from the street filtered through the slats just enough for them to see.
“Look,” Sony said, “there’s hay too. Just like in the cartoons.”
“Well, it’s not very warm—but warm enough.” Maureen was already testing out the hay pile with her hands. “It’s soft too,” she added, sitting down and wincing as she rubbed her knee. “But this is kinda crazy, guys. Are we really gonna do this? Sleeping in a barn? I feel like I’m back in high school after a shitty dance.”
“What kind of high school did you go to?” said BJ, who had suggested they sleep in the van. But Maureen’s knee needed to stretch out through the night or it’d lock up come morning.
Hai flipped open his phone and scanned its light across the interior, revealing a cluster of wheeled metal dumpsters. He reached into one of them and scooped up a handful of sandy clumps. Bringing them to the light, he recognized bulbs of garlic, their stems still attached, left to cure in huge bins throughout the barn. He turned to tell the others and saw them settling in, exhausted. BJ had found an old couch along the wall and was lying down with her hoodie pulled over her head, texting on her phone.
“It should be pretty safe here.” Hai walked toward the hay piles and closed the tractor doors they had slipped through.
Maureen turned over on her side. “Smells like an old horse.”
“Old and weird,” Sony added, sniffing the air. He had been quieter than usual, other than his burst of excitement when they passed Chicopee, where he went on and on about the Ames Company, producers of standard-issue officer sabers for the Army of the Potomac. Hai was about to lie down when he remembered the backpack with Grazina’s pills in the van. He asked Sony to come with him to fetch it.
They left Grazina lying beside Maureen and walked back. The spring air touched their tongues with scents of alfalfa, sweetgrass, and wild thyme. A stand of dogwoods, furred with buds and silhouetted against the streetlight, swayed from a breeze coming off the hills. Hai got in the van, Sony next to him in the back seat. It felt like a good place to be still for a while, the only sound the occasional semi coming off the interstate to park in one of the cutouts along exit ramps for the night. That and the branches clacking here and there across the fields.
Hai grabbed the backpack and hugged it to his chest. He popped two Dilaudids, chewing to get their magic out quicker.
“When I was little, far back as I can remember,” Sony said, his voice eerily distant. “I used to have this dream, you know. I dreamt I was flying over East Gladness. It’s always at night and I can see the little streetlights flickering between the leaves and I’m flying but I don’t hear any wind. Sometimes the dream starts with me high up in the sky. Sometimes I’m on my way up, sometimes I’m coming down. Sometimes I’m over the water tower or the power plants or the big Walmart off Route 7. And for some reason I know—you know how you know things in dreams without nobody telling you?”
“Yeah.” Hai turned to look at his cousin.
“Well for some reason I knew that the people inside every house in East Gladness, and even beyond that, all across the county, were really penguins. Birds with wings that don’t work. Their rubbery feet shuffling through the little rooms below. And I would just keep soaring. And the thing is, in the dream I can never tell if I’m also a penguin or not. And every time I try to put my hands out in front of me I don’t…I don’t see nothing. But I must be something else since I’m flying and all, and penguins, their wings don’t work. I just can’t tell if, according Darwinian evolution, if the penguins ever flew, whether their wings worked once before, long ago, or were they, like, a hundred years away from working. I wonder if I’m just floating up there alone, the only penguin with wings. And I don’t know if I’m ahead of everybody or behind them. You know what I mean?”
“But whatever it is, it’s a good thing, isn’t it—to have wings?”
“To have wings you need to want to go somewhere. But it feels wasted on me, you know? In my dreams and in real life, I always wanted to stay in East Gladness. I hated going to Florida, you know that?”
“I can imagine,” Hai said, the penguin still flying in his head.
“You know my dad wrote to me once.” Sony leaned back and stared at the peeling ceiling. “He told me about all the trees and the plants up there in Vermont. And even though I knew it was my mom the whole time, once in a while I’d wake up in the middle of the night and pretend it was real. That it was him.”
“I think your dad would’ve written you anyway.”
“It was nice to be awake in the middle of the night in the group home. I wasn’t used to the room so I imagined I was in another place reading my dad’s letters. I’d always read them soon as they came in the mail. But then, at three in the morning, I’d read them again, this time with the flashlight, and pretend they were really his.”
“I guess both your mom and dad were talking to you at once.”
“Yeah, the best of both worlds.” Sony grinned woodenly at the ceiling. Then he turned to Hai and said, “Hey, can you say something interesting? I don’t feel like going to bed yet.”
“Okay…” Hai bit his lip and traced his mind. “Okay, how ’bout this. You remember that one summer—I must’ve been, like, ten and you were eight—and we rode that paddleboat, trying to go all the way to Canada?”
“The time we took a road trip to the Great Lakes together,” Sony said, real quiet. “Everyone was there. My mom, Grandma, and my dad. And your mom too. We rented a cabin on Lake Michigan, right? It looked like Abraham Lincoln’s cabin, and when I asked my dad if it was, he said it was the exact cabin Lincoln was born in. But I knew he made that part up.”
Low voices floated out from the barn’s mouth where the others were.
“Why did we go?” Sony asked.
“To Lake Michigan?”
“To Canada.”
“I remember seeing the yellow paddleboat on the beach, and as we were trying it out, you said you wanted to see if we can make it to Canada. I’d never been to Canada. Still haven’t.”
“It’s right above Vermont,” Sony said.
“After a while we were in the middle of the great lake and the shore was so small and everyone was in the cabin, everyone but your dad. He was this tiny speck swimming toward us. It was like some duck flapping toward our boat. And we didn’t even care. We just kept paddling.” Hai shook his head in fond disbelief. “Were you scared?”
“I wanted to keep going. It was a paddleboat, but it felt so big, like we were on this huge ship, and I wanted to go to Canada.”
“All of a sudden there was this slap on the boat and it leaned to one side, and your dad was right next to us clinging to the base and catching his breath. But, you know, the weird thing was, he wasn’t mad at us, remember? He kinda had no reaction at all. He just said something like, Come on, guys, you’ve gone far enough. Then he sat down next to us, his feet in the waves, and we just drifted for a while without saying nothing. And I remember feeling kinda weird, how quiet we all were. Just the waves tapping on the plastic boat and your dad, the adult, seemed relieved to be floating with us, like he didn’t wanna go back either. Then you asked him. You remember what you asked him?”
“I think so.” Sony was caressing the scar on his head now.
The murmurs in the barn had died down and only the dark mouth remained.
“You said, Ba, do you see Canada from here? And it was like your voice woke him up from a long dream and he said, Yeah, yeah, it’s just up there, son. But I looked and looked and all I could see was more water, all the way to the edge.”
“Yeah, I remember now.”
“But why would he lie about that? It makes no sense.” Hai’s hands were vaguely in front of him now, and he made an effort to gather them back to himself.
“Maybe he did see it. We don’t know that.” Sony was holding his cheeks with both hands and watching the ceiling like he could see through it.
Hai had the urge to tell him about the afternoon he stood on the beams of King Philip’s Bridge last summer, all that rain on his face—but thought better of it. “Come on, let’s get these back to Grazina. She needs another dose before bed.” Hai got up, but Sony didn’t move.
“I’ll meet you in there,” Sony said without looking at him. “I just wanna be here for a while. It’s kinda nice.”
“Okay.”
“Okey dokey,” he grinned, but Hai couldn’t see his teeth flash in the dark.
Back in the barn, Hai gave Grazina her last dose, then broke a Pop-Tart in half and placed it in her palm. He then tucked her blanket along her length, laid his UPS jacket across her chest for good measure, and stretched out between her and Maureen.
Grazina stared at him, hay clinging to her hair, chewing. “You still working on your little novel, Labas?”
“In my head I am,” he lied.
“Good boy.” She finished eating but seemed lost in thought.
“What you thinking about?” he said.
“I should’ve known all along that you were liggabit.”
“Really? How so?” he whispered.
“You ask so many damn questions. Normal boys don’t ask so many questions.” She chuckled and turned the other way. “Good night, Labas.”
“Good night.” And soon the jacket over her body rose and fell with steady breaths.
BJ was already snoring softly a few feet away. When he heard Maureen shuffling behind him, he offered her a Dilaudid from his stash.
“Look at you,” she said, yawning and extending her hand. “You’re like a Walgreens over here.” She slapped the pill into her mouth and rubbed her knee. “Thanks, hun. Oh, nice shirt.” Maureen nodded at his T-shirt, the one he had gotten from rehab and had been wearing most days under his uniform. “A New Hope. My personal favorite, if I had to choose.”
“Uh. This is a very, very different new hope,” he smiled. “But hey, I was thinking of something I wanted to run by you. What if…” His eyes sifted the slats for starlight. “What if the reptiles aren’t actually bad at all? Like, what if they’re here as a safeguard, just so we don’t all kill ourselves, you know?”
“Go on,” she said without moving.
“Maybe it’s their job: instead of getting us to kill each other, they’re actually down there stopping us from nuking everybody. And once we evolve beyond that, and get to a higher realm of thinking, they’ll bring us with them to a new place. A place only the good ones get to go.”
“Nice try, mister. But now you sound like a cult leader. Why don’t we stick to corn cake for now, yeah?”
“But—” Hai bit his lip and watched the dust motes floating through a shaft of moonlight. “Does it matter if the reptiles suck all his energy if, like, overall, after everything, Paul still had a decent life? That you gave him a good life, even with the monsters underground?”
Maureen was silent for what seemed like a long time, then exhaled and said, “When you’re somebody’s mother, nothing’s good enough. Good and bad doesn’t exist.”
“But isn’t Star Wars all about good and bad? You keep saying everything’s—”
“Go to sleep and stop fussing about lizards. They’re probably draining our ether as we speak, and I don’t got much to spare as it is.”
“Okay.” Hai’s glasses, with the one lost arm, slipped off his face. “Good night, Maureen.”
He sat up from the hay and cocked his head, listening. To make sure it was real.
Then it came again. Someone whistling outside the barn, distinct and clear—and close.
The others were still asleep. Maureen was snoring lightly, her back rising and falling. Through slats in the barn, the near-white fog was so thick it seemed illuminated by artificial light. What time was it? How long had he been asleep? He rose and crept out of the barn’s mouth, looking around.
It was both late and early, the dark untouched by dawn. The whistling went on in uneven intervals, as if someone was forgetting the melody and had to stop to draw it up again. He wandered away from the van, toward the meadow, where dew, freshly gathered upon the weeds, sparkled around his feet.
The nearby highway was empty. He looked about in the absolute stillness, his breath sounding larger than the life it worked to keep. That’s when he saw the greenish light flake ahead of him, like unearthly strobes flaring through the bracken. As he headed toward it, hands outstretched through the mist, the emerald lumens shifted and bloomed above the branches like tree-high northern lights merging into a globular mass. The sight made him turn his head toward the barn, where his friends were locked inside the world of sleep, to make sure he hadn’t stepped into a portal.
He pushed on, waving away low branches until he stumbled into a second field, where it all came into view. He didn’t notice his knees had touched the ground as he stared up at the thing gliding past him. An enormous ship, an ark made with features fashioned from a primitive century, pulsing with a sickening green light as if cast from melted glow-in-the-dark stars, swam soundless over his head. All around him the trees, without wind, leaned to one side, and long grasses were pressed to the ground, as if the ship emitted a silent propulsive force.
He searched the hull and decks for people, but none could be seen. The ship kept moving but its sails were still and drooped. When it touched the tree line ahead, the branches never cracked or fell away. Soon the hull was devoured by a forest that stretched to the foot of the mountains. And before long only green streaks could be seen, obscured behind increasing canopies as the ship sailed off. That’s when the whistling returned.
He scrambled to his feet and swung his head toward the sound.
In the path the ship had come, he saw a figure slowly drawing up to him, moving with a precise, clean gait, its footsteps sucking mud.
When his eyes adjusted, the outline of an immense black hog, tall as a child, came to view.
With his hand shielding the light fanning out from behind the animal, a light that seemed to have no source, he saw that the hog was actually a deep chestnut brown, with a spot of cream above its left eye the size of a church wafer. As if in greeting, the pig started to whistle a tune he quickly realized was the start to “Silent Night.” He walked toward the song until he was just a foot away and could hear the animal’s massive lungs working underneath.
“Hello,” he said, his hand reaching out, and found himself cupping the hog’s chin. Through the warm skin he felt the song swelling past the animal’s hidden teeth.
“I don’t know how to be,” he said, his own harried plea scaring him. “How do you stay here? How does anybody stay here?”
He recalled the story Russia had told him, of the man who walked to the store for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Is it possible for a hole to be cut open and for you to step inside it—not to be destroyed, but simply gone? Where on earth was elsewhere possible? Is that what the pills do, in the end? Is that what was happening to Grazina? The brain’s derangement of itself to other reckonings? Is it possible to be a hog in a field left behind by Noah’s ark, whistling “Silent Night,” and not be the loneliest thing in the universe?
“Don’t let the emperor get you, buddy,” he said as the whistling dwindled to an airy whir.
The hog’s eyes roved, as if searching for a crack inside the boy, a way in.
Then Hai started to sing along. And as he did the hog shifted on its hooves, and its eyes rolled back, revealing two white pool balls before slowing to a stop, like a statue that suddenly remembered it was made of stone. Hai bent close enough to feel the beast’s breath on his face.
“I’m sorry, Bà ngoại,” he said in Vietnamese. “I’m so sorry. Sorry, Noah. Sorry, Ma. Sony, Aunt Kim, Uncle Minh. I let you all down. I tried my best, but I don’t know how to be here.”
He peered into the hog’s barely open mouth and saw a fractal of the green light glowing there. And it was the light of morning coming through the barn slats. And he felt a radius of warmth on his skin and turned to find Sony’s face, inches away. He was blowing on Hai’s cheek the way one blows on a window to write on it. “You were mumbling. And you looked very sad,” Sony said, “so I’m giving you an okay.” And with his finger Sony wrote the word okay.
“There,” he said, satisfied. “Just like new.”
“Labas.” Grazina stirred next to him. “Is it tomorrow yet?”
“I think so,” Hai said, looking down at himself, still here.
