Cloud Cuckoo Land (18 page)

Jessi Ko says, “What do you think it feels like, to be sick?” and Omicron says, “I hate polynomials, but I do wish Dr. Pori would show up,” and below them the young children hold virtual hands and their bright voices fill the atrium,

We move as one

In everything we do.

It takes everyone together,

Everyone together,

to get to—

and Sybil announces,
All non-medical personnel to their compartments, no exceptions, initiating Quarantine Level Two.

A
s the weather warms, Rex takes to gazing at the hills around Camp Five and chewing his lower lip as though contemplating some vision in the distance that Zeno cannot see. And one afternoon Rex waves him closer and, though there is not a soul for fifty feet in any direction, whispers, “What have you noticed, on Fridays, about the petrol drums?”

“They drive the empty ones to Pyongyang.”

“And who loads them?”

“Bristol and Fortier.”

Rex looks at him a moment longer, as though waiting to see how much can be transmitted between them without language.

“Have you ever noticed the two drums behind the kitchen sheds?”

After roll call Zeno examines them as he walks past, dread percolating through his gut. These drums, at one point used to store cooking oil, look identical to the gasoline drums, except that their lids can be removed. Each appears large enough for a man to crawl inside. But even if he and Rex managed to fold their bodies into them, as Rex seems to be suggesting, even if they convinced Bristol and Fortier to seal them inside, hoist them onto the fuel truck, and tuck them among the empty fuel barrels, they'd need to stay inside for who-knows-how-long while the truck drove the notoriously dangerous road to Pyongyang, without headlights, dodging overhead patrols of American bombers. Then—somehow—the two of them, night blind from vitamin deficiency, would need to climb out of the drums undetected and cross miles of mountains and villages in their disgusting clothes and ruined boots with their unshaven faces and nothing to eat.

Later, after dark, a new anxiety comes sliding into place: What if by some miracle they actually succeeded? What if they weren't killed by guards or villagers or a friendly B-26? If they made it all the way to the American lines? Then Rex would go back to London, to his students and friends, perhaps to another man, someone who has been waiting for him all these months, someone Rex has been too kind to mention, someone infinitely more sophisticated than Zeno, and more deserving of Rex's affection.
Νόστος
,
nostos
: the journey home, the safe return; the song sung around the feast table for the shipwrecked steersman who finally found his way back.

And where would Zeno go? Lakeport. Back to Mrs. Boydstun.

Escapes, he tries to tell Rex, are stories from movies, from some older, more courteous war. Besides, their ordeal is bound to end soon, isn't it? But seemingly every day, Rex spins up more and more detailed plans, stretching to make his joints more flexible, analyzing guard shift patterns, polishing a tin to make what he calls a “signaling mirror,” speculating about how they might sew bits of food into the linings of their hats, where they might hide during the nightly count, how they might urinate while inside the drum without soaking themselves, whether they should approach Bristol and Fortier now or just hours before they do it. They'll use code names from Aristophanes's
The Birds
; Rex will be Peisetairos, which means Trustyfriend; Zeno will be Euelpides, Goodhope; they'll shout,
Herakles!
when the coast is clear. As though it will all be an amusing escapade, a first-class caper.

At night he can feel the activity of Rex's mind next to him like the glare of a spotlight—he worries the whole camp will see it. And each time Zeno contemplates wedging himself into an oil drum and being loaded onto a truck to be driven to Pyongyang, cords of panic draw tighter around his throat.

Three Fridays pass, white cranes migrating north over the camp in flocks, then yellow buntings, and Rex only whispers plans, and Zeno exhales. So long as it stays a rehearsal, so long as the rehearsal never turns into performance.

But one Thursday in May, the prisoners' kitchen full of low, silver light, Rex drifts past Zeno on his way to a re-education session and says, “We're going. Tonight.”

Zeno scoops some soybeans into his bowl and sits. The thought of eating makes him queasy; he worries the others will hear his pulse thudding in his temples; he feels as if he should not move, as if, by speaking those three words, Rex has turned everything to glass.

Outside, seeds blow everywhere. Within the hour, the big Soviet flatbed truck, its hood pocked with bullet holes, its bed full of fuel drums, rumbles into camp.

By evening it's raining. Zeno gathers a last load of wood and manages to carry it to the kitchen. On his straw mat he curls up in his wet clothes as the light bleeds out of the day.

Men trickle in; rain rattles on the roof. Rex's mat stays empty. Could he really be out behind the kitchen sheds? Pale, determined, freckled Rex, folding his emaciated body into a rusted oil drum?

As night fills the barracks, Zeno tells himself to get up. Any minute now, Bristol and Fortier will load the truck. The truck will pull away, the guards will come and do the headcount, and Zeno's chance will have come and gone. His brain sends messages to his legs but his legs refuse to move. Or maybe it's his legs sending messages up the chain of command—
make me move—
and it's his brain that refuses.

A last few men come in and drop onto their mats and some whisper and some groan and some cough and Zeno sees himself rising, slipping out the door into the night. The time has come, or has already passed; Peisetairos is waiting inside his drum, but where is Euelpides?

Is that the growl of the truck engine starting?

He tells himself that Rex will never go through with it, that he will realize that his plan is unsound, suicidal even, but then Bristol and Fortier return and Rex is not with them. He studies their silhouettes for a clue but can read nothing. The rain lets up and the eaves drip and in the dark Zeno hears men snapping the bodies of lice with their fingernails. He sees Mrs. Boydstun's ceramic children,
their rosy cheeks, their unblinking cobalt eyes, their accusatory red lips. Sheep Shagger, Wop, Swish. Fruit Punch. Zero.

Around midnight the guards roust them and shine battery-operated lights in everyone's eyes. They threaten interrogations, torture, death, but without much urgency. Rex does not reappear in the morning or the afternoon or the morning after that and over the next several days Zeno is interrogated five separate times. You are confidants, you are always together, we've heard that you two are always scratching code words in the dust. But the guards seem almost bored, as though they are participating in a show for an audience that has not arrived. Zeno waits to hear that Rex has been captured a few miles away, or relocated to another camp; he waits for his efficient little frame to come round a corner, push his glasses up his nose, and smile.

The other prisoners say nothing, at least not around Zeno; it's as though Rex never existed. Maybe they know Rex is dead and want to spare him the pain or maybe they think Rex is cooperating with propaganda officers and implicating them in lies or maybe they're too hungry and exhausted to care.

Eventually the Chinese stop asking questions and he is not sure whether this means Rex has escaped and they are embarrassed or Rex has been shot and buried and there are no more questions to which they seek answers.

Blewitt sits beside him in the yard. “Chin up, kid. Every hour we're aboveground is a good hour.” But most hours Zeno does not feel like being aboveground anymore. Rex's pale arms, aswarm with freckles. The intricate flickering of the tendons in the backs of his hands while he scratched out words. He imagines Rex arriving safely back in London, five thousand miles away, bathing, shaving, dressing in civilian clothes, putting books under one arm, heading off to a grammar school made of bricks and ivy.

His longing is such that Rex's absence becomes something like a presence, a scalpel left behind in his gut. Dawn light glimmers on the surface of the Yalu and crawls up the hills; it sets the thorns on
the brambles aglow; the men whisper,
Our forces are ten miles away, six miles away, just over that hill. They'll be here by morning.

If Rex was killed, did he die alone? Did he murmur to Zeno in the night as the truck rumbled away, assuming that he was in the barrel next to his? Or did he expect Zeno to fail him all along?

In June, three weeks after Rex's disappearance, guards march Zeno and Blewitt and eighteen other of the youngest prisoners into the yard and an interpreter tells them they are being released. At a checkpoint two American MPs with shiny cheeks check Zeno's name on a roster; one hands him a manila card that reads
OK CHOW
. There's an ambulance ride across the demarcation line and then he's brought to a delousing tent where a sergeant sprays him head-to-toe with DDT.

The Red Cross gives him a safety razor, a tube of shaving cream, a glass of milk, and a hamburger. The bun is extraordinarily white. The meat glistens in a way that does not look real. It smells real, but Zeno is certain that it is a trick.

He returns to the United States on the same ship that took him to Korea two and a half years before. He is nineteen years old and weighs 109 pounds. On each of the eleven days he is on board he is interviewed.

“Give six examples of how you tried to sabotage the Chinese effort.” “Who got better treatment than anyone else?” “Why was so-and-so given cigarettes?” “Did you ever feel any attraction to the communist ideology?” He hears that the Black soldiers have it worse.

At one point an army psychiatrist hands him a
Life
magazine opened to a photo of a woman in a bra and panties. “How does this make you feel?”

“Fine.” He hands the magazine back. Fatigue rolls through him.

He approaches every debriefing officer he can about a British lance corporal named Rex Browning, last seen at Camp Five in May, but they say, we're not Royal Marines, we're the United States Army,
we have enough men to keep track of. At the docks in New York there are no brass bands, no flashbulbs, no weeping families. On a bus outside of Buffalo, he begins to cry. Towns flash by, followed by long stretches of dark. Six floodlit signs, each twenty feet apart, wink past:

THE WOLF

IS SHAVED

SO NEAT AND TRIM

RED RIDING HOOD

IS CHASING HIM

BURMA-SHAVE

M
r. Bates, the sixth-grade teacher, has a dyed mustache, a blazing, godlike temper, and zero interest in his students wearing ear defenders during class. Every morning, to start the day, he switches on his This-Is-Very-Expensive-So-You-Kids-Better-Not-Touch-It ViewSonic projector and shows videos of current events on the whiteboard. The class sits, uncombed and yawning, while at the front of the room landslides smash Kashmiri villages.

Every day Patti Goss-Simpson brings four fish sticks to school in her Titan Deep Freeze lunch box and every day at 11:52 a.m., because the cafeteria is being remodeled, Patti puts her terrible fish sticks in the terrible microwave at the back of Mr. Bates's room and presses the terrible beepy buttons and the smell that pours out feels to Seymour like he's being pressed face-first into a swamp.

He sits as far from Patti as he can, plugs his nose and ears, and tries to daydream Trustyfriend's forest back into existence: lichen hanging from branches, snow slipping from bough to bough, the teeming settlements of the NeedleMen. But one morning in late September, Patti Goss-Simpson tells Mr. Bates that Seymour's behavior toward her at lunch hurts her feelings, so Mr. Bates mandates that Seymour eat beside her at the center table, right beside the projector stand.

11:52 a.m. arrives. In go the fish sticks. Beep boop beep.

Even with his eyes closed Seymour can hear the fish sticks rotating, can hear Patti snap open the microwave door, can hear the fish flesh sizzling on her little plate as she sits back down. Mr. Bates sits behind his desk chomping baby carrots and watching mixed martial
arts highlights on his smartphone. Seymour hunches over his lunch box trying to plug his nose and cover his ears at the same time. Not worth eating today.

He is counting to one hundred in his head, eyes closed, when Patti Goss-Simpson reaches and taps him with a fish stick on his left ear. He jerks backward; Patti grins; Mr. Bates misses the whole thing. Patti squints her left eye and points the fish stick at him like a gun.

“Pow,” she says. “Pow. Pow.”

Somewhere inside Seymour a final defense crumbles. The roar, which has chewed at the edges of every waking minute since he found Trustyfriend's wing, blitzkriegs the school. It swarms over the ridge above the football field, mashing everything in its path.

Mr. Bates dips a carrot into hummus. David Best belches; Wesley Ohman cracks up; the roar explodes across the parking lot. Locusts hornets chain saws grenades fighter jets screaming screeching fury rage. Patti bites off the barrel of her fish stick gun as the walls of the school splinter. The door of Mr. Bates's room flies away. Seymour puts both hands on the projector cart and pushes.

A radio in the waiting room says,
Nothing tastes better than a fresh-picked Idaho apple.
The crinkling of the paper on the examination table borders on the untenable.

The doctor taps a keyboard. Bunny is wearing her Aspen Leaf smock with the two pockets in front. Into her flip phone she whispers, “I'll work a double on Saturday, Suzette, I promise.”

The doctor shines a penlight in each of Seymour's eyes. She says, “Your mother says you talked to an owl in the woods?”

A magazine on the wall says,
Be a Better You in Fifteen Minutes a Day.

“What kinds of things would you tell the owl, Seymour?”

Don't answer. It's a trap.

The doctor says, “Why did you smash the classroom projector, Seymour?”

Not a word.

At checkout Bunny's arm spelunks in the cavern of her purse. “Is there any chance,” she says, “you could just bill me?”

In a basket on the way out are coloring books with sailing ships in them. Seymour takes six. In his room he draws spirals around all the boats. Cornu spirals, logarithmic spirals, Fibonacci spirals: sixty different maelstroms swallow sixty different ships.

Night. He gazes out the sliding door, past the backyard, to where moonlight spills across the vacant lots of Eden's Gate. A single carpenter's lamp glows inside a half-finished townhome, illuminating an upstairs window. An apparition of Trustyfriend floats past.

Bunny lays a 1.69-ounce package of plain M&M's on the table. Beside that she sets an orange bottle with a white cap. “The doctor said they won't make you dumb. They'll just make things easier. Calmer.”

Seymour grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes. The ghost of Trustyfriend hops to the sliding door. His tail feathers are gone; one wing is missing; his left eye is damaged. His beak is a dash of yellow in a radar dish of smoke-colored feathers. Into Seymour's head he says,
I thought we were doing this together. I thought we were a team
.

“One in the morning,” Bunny says, “and one at night. Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.”