(If you like this story, please check out my books, such as this collection of alternate history scenarios, this postmodern dirty-joke novel, or this straightforward suspense thriller,)
Any account I could give would be more notable for the incompetence of its narrator than for any fresh insight it might cast on the already over-documented events of that Thursday. Yet that I was present at what has proved to be one of the seminal events of the last twenty or thirty years may permit me to go on self-indulgently and at some length about my experiences. My grandfather, who churned the sand beneath his feet one June morning at Normandy has exercised a similar privilege in his day, and I can do no less than to follow in his example. And perhaps apologize to the future for being there at its conception, which is no less than our parents owe to us, and theirs to them.
It was an East Coast summer camp with a name that was, at the very least, well-intentioned. I suppose the whole camp was well-intentioned, the product of progressive thinking and intensive library research. If this were a longer or more ambitious narrative I would take pains to portray and individuate each member of its staff…but I would then be misrepresenting events. They were, in fact, nearly faceless, nearly identical, indeterminate even as to age and gender. They all had long silver hair, and were all, even the girls, named Harry. Their leader was an older man with a mustache, a doctor of philosophy and of medicine, named Mr. Kearn. He was a shadowy figure, they were all shadowy figures, speaking mainly to our parents and the press. In fact, there might have been only one Harry, multiplied in my youthful imagination (like the number of breasts my mother had; God help me I remember three).
There was, of course, a typical camp hierarchy, or at least a hierarchy I have taken for typical. There were counselors, who taught crafts and sent you to bed. The younger kids, K through third grade, had teachers, and spent all day in classrooms. There may have been several other hierarchical tiers I have elected to omit here. The camp had an ideology of some sort, but I have forgotten it, or they had: It wasn’t exactly emblazoned on the gates. I assume the camp had a schedule too, but it was kept from us, and half the time from dazed, wandering counselors as well.
A thousand Disney movies or after-school specials will give you enough of an idea of what camp itself was like, and I will not burden us both with the weight of description. It was not bad. It was (fine; fine; let us be reminded, then) nature hikes and canoeing, singalongs and wallet making (for the youngsters, maybe), activities so trite I hesitate to affirm their existence with a mention, all happening at prescribed times. There were prescribed times to sleep, and to eat, but the times kept changing, and I never really caught on. I’m not even sure why I was there, that summer; I had never been to a sleep-away camp before. There was perhaps a problem at home. My friends at camp were if not exclusively still primarily my two bunkmates: Alan, who was our ringleader, and Dan, who was strong but stupid and very nearly blind. I even had a girlfriend of sorts, whose name was Ellen, and her neck was beautiful. She wasn’t really my girlfriend, but I liked her, and she seemed to like me, and we had talked once or twice; I would like to sound tender when I speak of her. Because she may be listening. They called me Jay, and I was what? maybe twelve.
There was a certain counselor whose mother motored into camp every Wednesday to check up on him. She would stand by his side constantly, outside the bathroom door if necessary, and only leave at night. He was from somewhere out in the country, and he spoke about politics with an improbable hick accent, while his mother never spoke at all. He believed everything he had ever heard or seen. One Wednesday, it will be important to note, he had me running what they called a fitness trail. We would jog together, the two of us, until we came across a balance beam, or a sham udder of dangling steel rings for the old hand-over-hand, or a barricade to climb. After the heroic surmounting of the obstacle we’d jog some more. This was not the day of the great events. This was Wednesday. This was one day before.
The counselor’s mother had walked from the other end of the trail, and our paths crossed at the chin-up station. She stood and watched while we drew ourselves up at the bar. Her son shrieked orders at me, in an accent I had previously only seen on TV (which I will not attempt to recreate here): “No, those are pull-ups, change your hands. No, don’t use your toes.” The toes upset him so much he had to stop chinning himself. “I said don’t use you toes.”
I couldn’t figure out what that meant, and asked him, or tried. I was pretty out of breath from the three or four chins I had already done, and frightened. The bar was too high for my toes to even touch the ground.
“Any idiot can do chin-ups if he points his toes,” the son told me. “You’ve got to curl them up, towards your knees.” He gave me a brief demonstration, folding his feet up, toes pointed skywards. “You’ve got to do it this way, like Jesus on the cross.” I gave it a try but found I couldn’t chin myself with my toes in that position. “See?” (he continued). “This is how Jesus was when he was on the cross.” I dropped off the bar, ready to demand an explanation about how anyone could have his feet nailed in such a ludicrous position, but the mother already had her hand on my shoulder, and was drawing me to one side. I was looking past her neck, to see the son chinning himself repeatedly, feet flexed. “He’s got a problem,” she whispered to me, through my tangled yellow foolish tresses. “He’s got a lot of problems, you shouldn’t blame him.” She had no accent, and was very articulate. I don’t mean she had the same accent I did, or some received accent; she had No Accent At All. She proceeded to tell me a story about her son’s childhood, which, she said, would explain everything. The story went on for a long time, and all the while the son was chinning, chinning, in the background past her neck. It was a beautiful story, although it has largely faded from memory, minor in light of the next day’s events. It was long and beautiful, and excited me very much, and, when she was done, I ran back to the cabin, past the chinning boy, still chinning. I couldn’t calm down. I jumped up and down on Alan’s bed, because mine was a bunk bed with Dan’s, and I could hardly jump on that. Thinking about that story was the first time I had ever thought about several things, things that seem juvenile now but were very exciting at the time: infinity and infinite regresses, and paradoxes, and something that was not sex, but darker and more spidery.
Alan and Dan came in with their Camp Calicut shirts and their greasy hair. “What are you so excited about?” Alan demanded. His eyes bulged like a toad’s; it was a disease I had forgotten the name of and was forbidden, by Alan, to speak of anyway. I don’t think he liked having something happening that he had not orchestrated; I don’t think he liked the idea that I was excited and he wasn’t the reason.
My mind rapidly paged through the file of possible lies. Devirginity? Killed a man? “Rider had some of his buddies over and they were all smoking blunts, and they gave me a toke,” I lied all in one breath.
“I know,” lectured Alan, “exactly how you feel.” He proceeded to narrate an unlikely story about a farmer’s daughter who grew a secret marijuana crop in the exact center of her father’s wheat field, a farmer’s daughter he’d met six months before while bicycling across Arizona. However unlikely it appeared at the time, really, really, who knew what Alan, or the world, was capable of?
There are a few ephemera from that night. A dinner, for example, and a game of rugby. Some cousin with whom he claimed he’d had sexual intercourse had sent Dan a letter with a five-page purity test enclosed. Dan could hardly make out the tiny print, so I read out loud while the three of us invented answers. I lost an extra point for Rider and this afternoon, but that hardly mattered. I think by the end we were all claiming we had experienced sexual intercourse with Dan’s cousin, perhaps simultaneously. My thoughts were elsewhere, pondering the (God save me) hermetic mysteries of infinity, partially revealed, like the jockey waistband peeking out of my counselor’s shorts as he strained on the chin-up bar. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep, and this fact was so painfully obvious that Alan swiped me a bottle of sleeping pills from Dan’s overburdened Little Black Bag. Dan was busy at the time pretending to look at a girlie magazine, with little success but much pathos, and hardly noticed. The bottle was translucent brown, as such bottles are, and bore Dan’s mother’s name on the label: I took three pills. I took three pills. I took three pills. I passed out listening to Alan’s faltering voice sing along to a CD press of a scratchy ’twenties recording by Yodelin’ Jimmie McBadger, who, Alan said, had once worked as a brakeman and scattered marijuana seeds off the back of a cross-continental train. Through Arizona, I thought last; he must have tooled through Arizona.
Methylphenidate hydrochloride, a mild stimulant, has often been used to control hyperactivity in children, but there is no reason to believe that the homey wisdom of folk medicine would not prescribe a sedative for the same symptoms. I am not qualified to diagnose Dan as hyperactive—it would have been but one of his problems, his many problems, if true—I am simply mildly rephrasing and repeating Dan’s own explanation for why he had sleeping pills with, he assured us, his mother’s blessing. “To keep me out of trouble” was his short version, and God knows I know what he means. Any mischief I might have been able to dream up the next morning would have been squelched by a newfound difficulty in thought, let alone motion. But I didn’t dream up any mischief anyway; no, I didn’t dream up any mischief (the implication, you see, is that someone else did).
Alan.
The morning, or the better part of that day, let me reemphasize, had the somewhat blurred aspect of that photograph your grandfather has of his “sainted” mother, greasy glass kissed daily for “nigh” twenty-odd years. Ellen was spied by my various informants (junior campers, ostensibly bought off with trading cards but really just kids willing or desperate for the excuse to ninja-crawl under bushes and cork their faces black in broad daylight) slinking off towards the lake with her two bunkmates. Ellen’s sinister bunkmates: these were: first: Brittany, a ridiculously perky and photogenic hoyden who bossed everyone and mimed forbidden acts on popsicles at snacktime. Also a rather enigmatic girl named Emma who was much more important than I will pretend she is here. Because she stayed in the background, almost like a mountain. She wasn’t very big, but she was almost like a mountain. Alan was up to something, too, and could be heard muttering dark prophecies into his cupped palms. Still three-quarters unconscious, I helped Dan study the day’s menu board, and, after the lad had reported our findings to Alan, I found myself instructed to collect and preserve as many eggs as I could at lunchtime. Eggs on the menu, collect the eggs, he said. Turned out served scrambled, but Alan Undaunted declared he had an “alternate supply.” I just wanted to go to sleep.
There was quite a scandal going on because that morning some ten year-old, Calicut’s only French camper, had urinated on the floor of his cabin “because that’s what they do in Marseille,” and a bevy of Harries was busy trying to contrive a disciplinary action that would appear neither racist nor too permissive. At one point they dropped the on-the-floor aspect of it altogether and changed the crime to Unauthorized Micturition, declaring that there had always been stipulated times for “going to the bathroom,” which our ten year-old friend (his name was Carl) had neglected to observe. But a few counselors started leveling charges of bathroom imperialism, and the words “Marseillaise” and “racism” were bandied about until Harries decided that, in lieu of a punishment, Carl would be given an award ceremony. All this fuss was in the periphery: everyone’s main concern was the fact that Carl, before his brilliant “Marseille defense,” had attempted to cover up his crime by dousing his cabin with an entire bottle of his mother’s perfume (suspiciously secreted in his suitcase). Fumes. This meant that three ten year-olds would be without a home for a few days, and everyone was espousing a not-in-my-backyard policy for their relocation. Especially for Carl, because not all the sympathy or suburban Marxism of the Camp Calicut counselors would get them to sleep under a loose-cannon pisser. The girls could be seen to smug and prance about, unworried. But we were all declaring not in my backyard! except me, and Alan and Dan, who were up to something. I just wanted to go to sleep.
Ellen was vague and uncommunicative around three, which was my prescribed time (aided by young spies) to bump into her. But everything was vague and uncommunicative to me, the haze I was in. Semicomatose, and yet for the first time I noticed the tips of El’s ears, which curled like the calyx of the opening Cosmos bipinnatus. The comparison sounds extravagant, but I swear it is true. I started to give her a lecture on the tubular tongues of the nectar-feeding flowerpecker, but slurred my words overmuch, and she soon left, thank God. I don’t know what I was thinking. Before I had only noticed her neck. I just wanted to go to sleep.
Ellen, whose neck or ears was not all that preoccupied me, those times I was preoccupied with her. She had that adorable fuck-that-noise attitude you find so often in the elderly (what? what do you find adorable in the elderly?). She told me (later) that she had realized young that eventually everyone becomes bitter ’n’ disillusioned, that eventually everyone perceives everything to be drek, and she might as well start there with that perception, and avoid all the bother of future disillusionment. If you give in before they start torturing you, U. S. Army survival manuals somehow neglect to advise, you cannot be broken. If you have no position to begin with, you cannot fall off of it. Dammit I chose to whisper those coordinates to the Nazis who captured me; I’m not weak, I’m just a douchebag. But unlike Ellen I still had some idealism left at the time, I was twelve, I still had some capacity to be fooled. Nietzsche may permit himself always to be deceived, lest he ever doubt the truth, which is a good take on giving-up-ahead-of-time in its own way. But to ever not be deceived? Really, what are the odds of that (O mother, who whispered accentless things to me)? And what was it I wanted to do again?
The Main Building, pride of Camp Calicut, forged from the living heart of a single onyx stone (one prankster told us; the fabrication doesn’t even make any sense), a large, salmon building with aluminum panels of primary colors (assorted) positioned under each window. Must have been, must have been built thirty years ago. The halls smelled of ammonia, and here were the dining hall, the classrooms, the staff offices, the infirmary (presumably), and six or seven unfortunate bunks. Really pretty urban for a camp, but we were never far from a city, and at night the airplanes buzzed in low, so you couldn’t hear the TV. At other times of the year it served as a high school and a fire station. Alan made us shut our eyes and walk the long twisty corridor from the dining hall to the stairwell, counting the steps to each turn. Seven turn left twelve turn right, you dig?
“Smells like ammonia,” said Dan
“How long do we have to remember these numbers?” I asked. Woozily, and all that.
“About forty minutes,” Alan said.
Your head hurts, of course, and you eyelids—it’s not that they’re heavy, just that it’s their natural state to be closed innit? and frog-marching them into any other state is an imposition on the Natural Order. But what does tiredness do to your memory, and, more pressing question, what did we do then? There was a large group of children assembled; the award ceremony for Carl that was. Somebody was shouting: “Thou fool! Thou fool!” again and again. A little girl in counterpoint chanted: “Fuck everything!” until she was shushed by an older sister. Alan had unlawfully gained the stage, speaking into a mike stand, and there were several eggs in midair. Officials dropping, their trousers torn off, and chaos. The art teacher had just hit me on the head with some kind of trowel (she was flailing away, they were falling before her like snow), so things’re a bit vague, all things except for that trickle of blood, bisected by my left ear, shoulder-bound. “The dark!” I heard Alan shouting, the slogan he’d contrived hours before. He had to repeat himself, it’s what they do on TV. “We’re all the same size in the dark.” If he’d timed it seven seconds better, that’s exactly when ace-in-the-hole Dan would have turned the lights off. We were in a closet, and I had just boosted him up to reach. All that blood in my eyes (from bending over it slid there), and I could still see he was pulling the wrong wires. Until he pulled the right one.
Alan was somehow at our side, and we ran down the corridor. “Alan,” I was saying over and over again. Everybody had been repeating lately, everybody, why not me? “Alan you forgot the emergency generators light up the hallways with emergency generators Alan.” My hand on my head, I was out of breath already. It was a long corridor and chock full of shadowy recesses in the fluorescent twilight. Dan, perhaps oblivious to the light/dark dichotomy, was loudly calling out the paces we’d memorized, getting every number wrong, careening off corners. All that noise, and you could still hear them behind us, probably gaining. We’re all the same size in the dark, but in the dim lambency of emergency power, adults have long legs. All that noise, and still you couldn’t miss the preternatural keening…
We were in the grade school wing (seventeen more paces till the next turn). It was the five- through seven-year-olds banging on the doors, screaming God save us God save us. The voices they use, like castrati on 78, but hey, they’re six, got that sixth sense rats departing got. And little kids fear the dark and it’s gotta be dark in those classrooms. Alan stopped and turned every knob, three, four doors in a row, even the neonatal ward. Children spilled out, raced down the corridor, many sucking deep drafts of air into their lungs, perhaps all the better to scream. Whatever else you say about Alan, he turned every doorknob. Let that be noted: entered in by the defense and granted by history. So the children toddled away; one set had their arms around each other’s shoulders, four abreast; makes you want to say aw. Okay then, we’re in g.d. awe, and we were running again. Corridor, nightmarishly long. New noises in the distance, explosions, cracklings like cellophane, the unmistakable whine of a bottle rocket. As Dan ricocheted off another door and into me, several things became clear. Like the fact that they (They!) wanted Alan, above all else, he was the keystone, he was the one they wanted, they wanted. It was only a matter of time before the constabulary mopped up any unseemly ruckus among the natives, but pukka sahib back there wanted Alan, and of all civet cats he must not slip back into the jungle. And they were close, they were close enough to get us, and when they did I was going to go down with Alan, brother. I was thinking clearer. The words, when I tried to speak, were heavy and printed in black letter, but the brain was a motorcade of activity, some synapses sparking four abreast. Thinking things like: What’s that popping noise?
A side corridor, receding into infinity, and down it dash two pink barrettes square as C. bipinnatus petals, attached to the head of Ellen. She was flanked by Brittany and the elusive Emma McUmbrarum, of course, their fists full of ladyfingers and the occasional match, coming towards us. They’d been conspicuously absent from Carl’s award ceremony. Brittany was giddy, desperate to explain her private cleverness. I mean, everyone knew about Alan’s inciting at the ceremony and he’d be bragging about it anyway, but Brittany, if nobody knew, imagine the hell that would be. You could see dancing in her eyes a half dozen dimly assimilated stories of cows led up bell towers, VWs reassembled one night in the Proctor’s second-story office, ha ha. We popped open an inflatable raft in Mr. Kearn’s office, she said, too rapid and breathless for quotes. And at the time we all had to pause and marvel. It now sounds vain and silly, like the fireworks they’d been setting off too, but in context it had an uncanny symmetry (appositeness is a wholly inadequate word) that you would not understand. An inflatable raft; such a coup! And speak of it, there it was, rafting down the corridor (I am obliged to mention the adverb eerily) to skid to a halt at our feet. Big and orange, and it sat there inert at our feet, secure in a job well done. Still confused Dan started to clamber in, but Alan pulled him away.
Looming into sight just then on the side-corridor horizon were Mr. Kearn and a whole host of Harries, their silver locks streaming behind them like a comet’s plasma tail. They were armed. And probably they were coming that way all along, weren’t they? The side corridor was a shortcut.
A few swift nods from Alan and his cognate Brittany and we had hoisted the raft over our shoulders and were running again, twelve legs laughing. One of those moments when you are led by nothing but the harmony of the spheres, for what else would drift Brittany’s raft (which I had christened Ellen’s raft) into our path, would bring us together as mutual cavalry now that the hordes were upon us? Weaving among ourselves, passing the raft from one to another, so no one gets too tired, no one falls behind, its fat bulk scraping the walls on each side. We were dimly aware of the Harries pitching eggs, bottles, bricks, Christ was that a trowel again? after us. They had had a vision (you could hear them extemporizing on it) of how things should have been, of the six of us downed and mildly maimed beneath their righteous fury, tripped up or conked out by this motley hail of soda cans and aquaria. Another, perhaps the platonic, timestream, and that was so; but no. Our serendipitous raft shielded us, and we knew no fear from the items booming off its bottom like a bass drum. One pink cosmic barrette popped off Ellen, went pinging along behind us. By the time they shouted “aim for the legs” they were almost out of ammo. And we hit the stairwell door and there is no more glorious feeling. A stray egg or two nicked my shoe, but that was nothing. A steady sigh came from a gash in our shield, but that was nothing (damn trowel). There! We dropped the raft and punched the fire-safety bars as one, and our soles echoed down the stairs rapid-fire. It felt like we had done something beyond mere: tossed a few eggs, blew up a few rafts (with a pop, that was the mystery pop (three ¶¶ previous), the pop of inflation), pulled a few plugs. At that moment it felt like we were literally reforging the cosmos and casting it into a more pleasing form. I may appear to have uttered a solecism, but that’s what it felt like. Mt. Emma’s middle finger flashed behind us; Alan even permitted himself to shout the extravagant pun: “C’mere putsch.” We were laughing and laughing.
The door marked exit was right in front of me when I heard someone, could it have been Ellen? cry, “No, Jay, the basement.” I turned to see my five comrades disappearing down more stairs, deeper into the bowels of the—
“Is there even a way out from down there?” I called after them. My head hurt. I followed. I made it to the basement door before it had even clicked in place—there was a small sign on it reading further fire exits through me—but I looked up and down the basement corridor and saw no one. Still a chance, I thought, to turn around and make for the out of doors. But I chose a direction and ran, and that direction was one of the basement options. Maybe I’d catch up to them. Maybe they were right around the corner. Music of the spheres, where are you?
An old sign on the wall, somewhat chipped, patiently explained the way to a fallout shelter. These tunnels, I recalled a guidebook saying, could go on for miles. This far north people tended to root underground in winter, their faces vein-blistered by the cold into star-nosed moles’. I passed the rumblings of a boiler room and the wet thumps of a washing machine, but really the only sound was my footstep, one sound repeated a thousand times through the hollowness, then repeated back to me in an echo that resembled rumbles and thumps. I called softly a name, her name, once or twice, but it wouldn’t do to be heard, not by my pursuers. Bit of dirt about, got it on me when I had to crawl. The pipes over my head had been patched with athletic tape and papier-mache, the corners with dusty webs. Wherein lurked the dreaded ettercap, her four-bladed chelicerae slavering. I couldn’t hear her summoning me, couldn’t see the malice in her many eyes, but I put some distance between me and her irregardful. By the time she had spun her tripwires across the floor I’d be long gone, would I, and those after me might make her acquaintance. I paused to give her a wink, to let her know that it was no hard feelings; these feelings are merely the feelings you feel in the tunnels. If only I didn’t also feel so goddamn crappy. Aloneness, and all that. I wanted to sit down, but Madame Ettercap had her eyes everywhere. The very air seemed sinister, almost…musty. I just wanted to.
I found a small (maybe 3” by 3” by 7”) cardboard box full of batteries in a fire-extinguisher niche, blue five-cent stamps curling up off its side. I held it as I walked, taking batteries out, sniffing them, sometimes discarding the leakers. As I progressed (and this is why I say I progressed), the walls started getting less tear-stained, the floor less gritty. I was heading up, not more than gradually, but enough that if I dropped a AAA it would roll. Roll away, towards whence I’d come. I rooted through for a nine volt with a lightning cat on the side, which I held upside down, placing both its little silver dimples against my tongue. Nothing. Alan had told me if you ever did that you’d die, but Alan was a fucking liar. Just keep walking, and I started hearing people. Makes you want to duck behind a garbage can, but I decided to act nonchalant. Businessmen were scurrying past now, all businessmen, occasional woman in a pants suit. Ties were yellow and spotted, or else candystriped red and blue. A yellow sign that was beginning to get towards dusted read: this way to airport, that way to subway but with arrows and no demonstratives. “Better avoid the airport,” I thought, and turned smartly on my heel.
But easier said in this underground maze. The sounds of the airplanes above and the metro below faded together into one long unwavering static, a kind of a rumble that came from everywhere and was echoed in the clockwork gears of the gray flannel suits lurching their flaccid passengers along. Policemen loitered in doorways, but how would they know who I am? A description, ha! I could hardly describe myself. He’s got, wot? eyes, right? and two of those. Feet, yeah feet. My hair, bright shining like the sun, might be a distinguishing feature, but it had grimed down in the underneath into a generic blah color. If I hadn’t been absolutely covered in filth I could have blended in anywhere.
The airport, for all my effort, was bearing closer. Every turn, or turn around, I made only set my feet more precisely on the brightly lit airport track. Might as well have been a moving sidewalk, the way I was going. Succumbing to fate, I tried to conjure up an alibi, or rather an excuse for my airport presence, but the best I could come up with was that I was flying to Chicago. There had to be a flight to Chicago, I reasoned, surely at least one. It’s a big airport, O’Hare is, to fly to. Hadda be.
A man dressed in a red uniform with darker-red stripes along his pants legs informed me that the flights tonight would be at 7:45 and 9:30, bowed, and opened the glass door. Through I went and thank you, doorman. The terminal was long and narrow, with gates all up one wall and benches down the other. In the center was a big town-square-type clock (it’s 7:30 already); at the far end double doors. Another red-dressed man was hustling people on the 7:45, 7:45, this way for the 7:45, are you sir, on the 7:45? I told him I was going to Chicago, and he lifted an eyebrow at me and turned away, keeping up his patter. There was a constant stream of people emerging from other gates, circling around, passing through and mingling with those headed for the 7:45. “Will you be taking the 7:45?” a Woman in Red asked me, and only me.
“I’m waiting for someone,” I said, because really, God knows where that 7:45 is going to, and I didn’t like that eyebrow bit. So I made a big deal about craning my neck and looking up and down the terminal. And that’s when I saw a pink barrette, a folded ear, a neck craned like mine was craned. I ran up to Ellen and hugged her like a drunkard, holding on for life, maybe even dear. As she stiffly patted me on the back I saw, at the edge of my field of vision and only for a moment, a girl who looked just like her, neck, ears, barrettes, and all, walk swiftly by. But I was too busy trying to conceal from her my erection to care. This is why you don’t hug girls like that at my age. And aw, but she was even worried about me. The year was 1991.
I didn’t even ask what she was doing there. Paranoid fantasies were a thing of the future, and at this point events didn’t connect, they seemed to shuffle together, but always running parallel and distinct. Even when they crossed there was no contact, just snaking around like the woven straps of a basket. Back then, for real, events didn’t connect, and who that doppelganger was I’ll never know. El and I spoke madly of an airplane plan to stow away for foreign climes, where the Chairman was already our father and mother, and revolution was already a thing of the past, decades past not dangerous minutes, a fact and not a hastily corrected fallacy; but soon abandoned it for talk of returning. Ellen was far too cynical to fall for that mother-and-father jive, anyway. The essential argument for returning was: They can’t punish everyone. The ringleaders were going down, true: Alan, and Brittany, and—but you couldn’t call Dan a ringleader, could you? Well they were going down. But the three hundred or so regular joes who just happened to be around, or who perhaps ran away at the first sign of trouble, could hardly be blamed. At Nuremberg they tried Goering, not Jerry and Uncle Fritz. Jerry went back to work at the choc’lit shop, Uncle Fritz barcalounged with a Katzenjammer Kids funny page. They’d wave to Ivan and John and Joe, and Ivan and John and Joe would wave back: They were too busy dissecting Hitler’s scrotum to care about kicking on the little guy. Officer, we ran away at the first sign of trouble; raft, what raft? (we practiced saying). Harry wouldn’t testify any different as we all looked the same to them.
So we were heading for some trouble, true. Could be a few cops there, maybe even the army depending on how bad it’d got, but probably just Kearn and Harry, back in control. What’s the worst they could do, send us home? If a camp shuts down it is no dishonor to be sent home. Outside through the double doors, and we gazed across the frozen lake towards the lights of Camp Calicut. Young lovers in long scarves promenaded across the ice, hands held secret in muffs. “Looks strong enough to walk on,” said Ellen; and she’d been across once before, one AWOL night with Emma to pull the clear plastic Lucky Strikes knob on the airport vending machine. We wrapped a mock muff of toilet tissue around our clasped hands and stepped on the ice. Cracks slipped out from beneath my feet like gradual lightning bolts, a meandering path multiplying in bullseye concentric circles. “I weigh more than you do,” I said, scrambling rapidly onto hands and knees spidered far from my body, diffusing the weight. I kept the tissue to swaddle numb palms, and slid along beside her with the heavy shuffling steps of a bear. On the interstate in the distance I could see two counselors I’d suffered under tearing away in Mr. Kearn’s car. With telescopic vision (temporarily granted me) I read their lips, learned for the first time that their names were Patrick and John. Patrick spat into his right hand, John into his left, and they prepared to proclaim themselves Spit Brothers, joined forever against the forces of chaos and anomie, against both the bourgeois establishment and the fascist underground. John reached over to join hands, but arms crossed in confusion and he took Patrick’s wrong, Patrick’s dry left hand, smearing it with saliva. Patrick wiped his own spit off his right palm, steering with his knees, and they held an oozing grip into the distance, perhaps a sunset in another twenty hours or so.
“But did your parents pay for this [Camp Calicut] on their credit card?” Ellen asked, sudden thought. “Because then our going back might screw up their credit rating, with the refund and all. I’m not sure how it works.” Her question snapped my head back around, away from the dwindling taillights, already as small as stars. Actually, I had just gotten my first credit card (gifted me by mother to buy button candy at the camp canteen) and they’d put the camp price total on it so I could build a credit rating. I told her not to worry, not about decadent credit ratings.
My shins were cold. “Not your hands?” Ellen asked, oh Christ touchingly concerned, but my hands were okay. My knees hurt and my shins were cold, and I could hear the ice crumpling like paper under my mass and scattering into bobbing pieces behind me, as scattered peoples in the Mongols’ wake. She wanted me to have some cover story prepared, in case one hand or knee slipped through the ice and I returned to camp with a sopping chill limb. “I’ll think of one when it happens,” was my answer; but I knew well, really, the kind of panic I’d be in once wet; I wouldn’t be thinking of any stories then. I knew it so well, but I couldn’t make myself prepare: too grim a thought, I guess. I had hardly even let myself speculate about the camp body count, a careless troweling here or there, bottle rocket up a nose and straight through to the brain pan. Dozens dead, headlines read (in my mind. Really it was much worse).
Ellen stopped and indicated of the lake, with sweeping gestures and whispers, “This part’s deep,” a caution for both of us really. “At least twenty feet, and there is an octopus king down there.” But the ice was so thick by this point it was practically black, and I stood up and trudged the last ten paces with dignity. Couldn’t even see what she was worried about, this close to the edge. Around the lip of the lake was a drift of snow to climb over, and then the camp lay before us like a ghost town. The unmistakable negative cylinder of bootprints everywhere, but no makers, no trackers, just their signs. The secret ideograms they formed were a blinding spirograph of complexity precluding any reading. “Who had gone whither and when?” (one might ask). The thousands of prints were noise in the snow.
Which snow plowed around our knees as we cut across to the paths, partially shoveled at least. Then a walk through the center of camp, past the Main Building, among the cabins. The absolute silence of a million birds flown away months ago, our footsteps reduced to a styrofoam squeaking. “Any moment now,” we whispered to each other, they’ll spot us and take us away. We knew we were in trouble like nothing ever, but hand in hand it could be borne. A store that used to sell souvenir postcards had the lights still on. Through the anti-theft gratings they put on the windows last Tuesday we could see Mr. Kearn and Harry in plush chairs, leaning over a card table by candlelight. We could have turned ourselves in right there, but we were in a snooze-alarm state. Just five more minutes. Let those two plot our punishments a little longer. Someone was bound to spy us soon. No reason to get up just yet…
Near the embers of the campfire pit rose a totem pole, faithful in spirit, at least, to the traditions of two thousand miles and two hundred years away. A small squatting child, nearly naked, with his hands tightly gripping the wings of a raven above him, appeared to have been intricately carved into the base of the pole. It was a slightly reddish color, compared to the images above it. We watched as the pole began to sway, and the child stagger in circles. “My God, it’s real,” Ellen gasped. The child, his face tortured into a coyote leer, staggered almost squat under the burden of a twenty-foot pole balanced on his head. His frantic scrabbling produced a phantom cone, with the pole for a generatrix and his footprints a directrix, which he attempted to resolve into a perpendicular. Yet the footpath circled more and more wildly, the pole angled more and more sharply, finally slipping off and crashing flaccid—literally flaccid, like a rubber chicken—on the ground. The child scrambled into the snowy brush, towards the cave that camp spelunkers used to go to to find used condoms and urine stains. “How did he escape the adults?” I asked, staring at the grotesques hewn in the pole. But there it was right in front of me: some factory-contrived wind spirit had been crudely chipped away at, and there was no mistaking that ferrety nose, or those amphibian eyes, it had been recrafted to resemble. It was Alan in wood.
“Well, I didn’t see that coming,” Ellen said. I hadn’t either. Events reoriented themselves in my mind: the police had not come; Mr. Kearn and Harry were behind bars; Alan and his troops had won. And then they were upon us. Springing out from the bushes, dropping coconut-like from trees, in some cases even tunneling under the snow to pop up at our feet: three hundred children aged five to fourteen, leering in the starlight. The youngest ones had their tongues hanging out and were panting like dogs. Alan, bedecked in a faux zebra-skin afghan and markered-up chef’s hat, entered through an orifice, puckering and then resealing, in the crowd. Dan, a leash connecting his belt and Alan’s, crouched at his master’s side, his fists wrapped in boxer’s tape. “Welcome to my kingdom,” Alan said, without a trace of irony.
Hello, Alan seemed to lack sufficient gravity, and so we were silent.
“You deserted the revolution,” said Alan, his minions silent, many armed with pruning shears or pointed sticks. “And who, in turn, abandoned you to your fate?”
Again, the truthful you did, buddy didn’t seem the way to go. Why did he even ask who abandoned us? The question made no sense. I said, without thinking, my knees dry but my palms wet, “A third girl.”
Everyone started laughing, some falling backwards into the snow, again and again because it feels so good. I realized that my statement would necessarily imply I was a girl, too, to round out, with Ellen, the trio. “I mean a third person,” I said. “A girl.” And then I realized there was only one answer to this question, and she was nowhere to be seen in this crowd. “Brittany,” I said. “She led us astray and then abandoned us,” Ellen said. “Brothers,” Alan said, and we shook hands.
They took us to the cave and prodded us with broom handles and tickled us under the arms for initiation. We sat in a circle then, a magazine-fed fire blazing in the middle, its smoke sucked out through fissures in the roof. The children in the back were invisible, where the five-year-olds with night vision nipped at each other’s necks and bayed. The second graders served snow-chilled soda cans to whoever cuffed and bullied them. I remember thinking: for this you turned the doorknobs, Alan? So they could become slaves and wild dogs?
But we were all much younger by that point, and I couldn’t have been more than eight myself. A girl in overalls, her face painted a garish purple, stood up, her back to the fire, and danced a little dance and sang a little song. This is the song she sang:
These are the jolly things I do:
I play and eat and take a poo.
And then I fish them from the bowl
And stuff them up my peepee hole.
Cheers, applause, author! The crowd were ecstatic, and shouting so, and only quieted to receive the much-anticipated second verse.
I suck my toes and blow my nose
And watch as Kleenex fungus grows.
I eat it up because it’s green…
Much like an apple I’d once seen.
Oh, they were wild for it, no college student at a summer job in an oversized Disney mask ever produced such rapture in them. The girl sat down and Alan rose up, like seesaw ends. His hands were far above his head, acknowledging the fans.
“Oh yeah, well, listen to this,” he said, “listen to this.” He had to repeat himself. Every eye turned to him. His army couldn’t even agree on whose steamboat it was, Miss Suzie’s or Miss Lucy’s, but they were of one accord there in the cave as, their faces half-illuminated and flickering, they waited with one ear, or with two ears each. What a hit we’d had in “These are the jolly,” and here Alan was promising something better! He smiled and worked the crowd with nothing more than winks and nods. “The little number I’m a-gonna do is popularly known,” he said, “as the Russian national anthem.” And Alan started to sing a song to the tune of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” about the miserable economic conditions in Soviet Russia. The narrator lamented the lack of vodka, toilet paper, lovely ladies, and representative government in crudely rhymed quatrains. He might well have written the piece himself. Nobody really got it, and those who could get it would have wanted something better; you could tell. A shame, really, but for all its jingoism, this song just wasn’t a winner. Alan bowed at the end to strained applause. As he straightened up, the light cast on his face revealed two evil eyes and a scowl. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded to the crowd. “How dare you laugh at a juvenile poop song and boo real satire, you illiterate savages?” He frothed as he spoke, his head snapping back and forth so flecks of spittle separated from their mother-mass and plunged, spherical in free fall, to the ground. And it’s not like they were booing him, just that whatever Roman triumph he was expecting, this wasn’t it. “You only like the easy songs; what kind of army are you?” He stalked away, out of the cave, where the snow had begun to fall again. I held Ellen’s hand and my breath. He was already losing control of them. He stood framed in the cave mouth, silhouetted against the lights of the airport and the city beyond. His plan was to march tomorrow and take it, and burn its skyscrapers to the ground. And he would, sure: You know well, thanks to the memory of Clio, muse of history, that he would do all he planned, and more. But how much longer (we did not yet, then, know) could he keep these children under his hand, before factions (Suzie/Lucy) splintered his army to nothing, and ochlocracy swept westward like the Huns? And there Alan would lie forgotten with a misericord passed through his throat behind them.
We could feel it all falling down around us, and so could Alan. It must have been worse for him. We watched him standing there alone, and I held Ellen close to me and whispered into her ear that it was already over.