The Alex Crow (12 page)

“You drive around in
this
?” Crystal Lutz said when they got out to Leonard Fountain's repurposed U-Haul van.

“Yes.”

“Bitchin'.”

“Be polite, Lenny,” 3-60 reminded him.

“Thank you,” the melting man said.

“Don't let her distract you from what you need to do, Leonard,” Joseph Stalin scolded.

“You are climbing in the van with the pretty girl,” 3-60 narrated. “You are very aroused.”

Leonard Fountain was quite possibly the most insane person on the planet.

Cobie Petersen raised his
hand in his most earnest Teacher's Pet fashion. He looked at his hand; then he looked at Max and me.

“Who wants to get stoned?” he said.

Max raised his hand. “I do.”

I shook my head. “Not me.”

The three of us sat, cross-legged on a clearing off the trail beside the cinder-block well house, listening to the splash of the spring water as it spilled from the overflow pipe.

I held our stolen flashlight. I shined it onto the pages of section one from
Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species
. Cobie Petersen scooted along the ground and got so close to me his knee came to rest on top of mine.

“I need some of that light,” he said. He dug around in his pocket and pulled out the pot and papers he'd taken from Larry's cabinet. He crumbled the weed onto the lap of his beige shorts and began rolling it up in one of the papers.

Staring down at his fingers in concentration, Cobie Petersen, who obviously had skill when it came to rolling marijuana cigarettes, said, “So, how's the book?”

“Oh. It's scary, I guess,” I answered.

“Scary? Mrs. Nussbaum? No way, dude.”

Cobie bent forward and licked the adhesive edge on his rolling paper, and then started making a second joint. He grabbed his crotch and adjusted himself.

“God! It's been a long-ass time since I've gotten stoned,” he said. “It's practically giving me a boner. What's our therapist say in there?”

“Well, I'm only in the first part, but it sounds like she really believes that the only way to save the human species from self-destruction is to get rid of all the males. At the World Conference on Male Declination in 2014, a universal charter was approved, stating that the male human was the principal driving mechanism behind our species' extinction, which the conference's panel of scientists estimated will occur sometime during the coming century. And there were even
men
scientists who participated in the study.”

“That's stupid,” Max said. “Without males, there wouldn't be a species. Duh. Maybe Mrs. Nussbaum missed that week in junior high school sex class.”

“She's a doctor,” I offered.

“That never excluded anyone from being fucking insane,” Cobie said.

He probably had a point.

“The book says that scientists have discovered a method to make viable, functioning sperm from female stem cells. Mrs. Nussbaum even claims that an American woman has actually given birth to two healthy daughters using
female sperm
.”

“That's the dumbest
and
grossest thing I've ever heard in my life,” Cobie Petersen said. “Girl sperm? Girls don't have sperm.”

“Female
sperm
?” Max asked. “That sounds totally gross.”

Cobie Petersen nodded thoughtfully. “Dude. If you ask me, sperm is just like farts. Everyone else's is totally gross except for your own.”

“I can see that,” Max said. “So I suppose Mrs. Nussbaum has a dick, or what?”

I shook my head. “No. They created the female sperm in a lab.”

“So Mrs. Nussbaum likes to
unclog the ketchup bottle
once in a while and thump out some
girl sperm
in her private laboratory? Can't blame anyone for doing that on slow days at work. Unless it gets you fired, I guess,” Max said.

“If she doesn't have a dick, where's her female sperm come out of, then?” Cobie Petersen asked.

I sighed. It was so frustrating and embarrassing, talking about sex with Max and Cobie.

“Yeah. That's ridiculous,” Max agreed, “impossible. You need to have guys on the planet—guys with dicks—if you think anyone's going to
shake the yokes out of their inauspicious stars
.”

And I was impressed by Max's ability to stretch a quote from Shakespeare into a statement on masturbation.

“According to Mrs. Nussbaum, you don't need guys anymore. Females can now make sperm,” I said.

Cobie Petersen finished rolling a second pot cigarette.

He reached across me with an open hand extended toward Max. “Dude. Let me have that lighter.”

I continued reading, trying to ignore the spark of the flame and the smell of burning pot just inches from my face. Cobie Petersen sucked in a tremendous drag, held it, then exhaled billows of blue-gray smoke. He passed the joint across me to Max.

Cobie Petersen said, “Ahhhh . . .”

I thumbed ahead in Mrs. Nussbaum's
Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species
. Apparently, the first section of the book was entirely devoted to the scientific studies that yielded the female sperm, failed attempts at fertilizing an ovum, and the successful development, just after the turn of our century, that produced two baby girls, born a year apart to the same mother.

Mrs. Nussbaum hailed this era as “the final century of man.”

Her dark prophecy was almost biblical in tone.

The second section of the book was a rationale for the argument in support of programmed male extinction. Mrs. Nussbaum made a reasonable point, after all, considering the terrible things males had done in their never-ending effort to push our species toward the precipice of extinction, and control and manipulate everything they ever came in contact with. With viable and genetically diverse female sperm, she postulated, males could rapidly become extinct if females simply decided to refrain from breeding with them. Since female sperm can only create female offspring, male extinction would occur within fifty years. But the most frightening aspect of Mrs. Nussbaum's case for facilitating the extinction of all male humans—she referred to it as “gender die-off”—was that her “Law of Male Uselessness” was primarily based on the results of comprehensive psychological and medical studies she had conducted over the course of the past decade on “a wide variety of males between the ages of twelve and seventeen years.”

Wide
variety?

Merrie-Seymour Boys!

We're Merrie-Seymour Boys!

We're learning healthy habits,

Smart as foxes, quick as rabbits!

My brother Max erupted into a coughing fit beside me, which caused Cobie Petersen to laugh so hard he farted and fell backward in the dirt.

And Cobie Petersen said, “I am so wasted, gents.”

Max held the little yellow cigarette directly in front of my face and said, “Come on, Ariel. Loosen up and have a little fun for once in your fucked-up life.”

I shook my head.

“I have had fun before,” I said.

“When?”

I thought about it. I honestly didn't have an answer for him. I remembered playing in Mr. Antonio's field with Marden and Sahar on my fourteenth birthday, how I'd been dressed as Pierrot, and had white makeup on my face, and the times I'd played chess in the camp with Major Knott.

“The sock puppet play this afternoon was pretty fun, I guess.”

“You just sat there with your fingers sticking out,” Cobie Petersen said.

“I moved them once in a while,” I argued.

Then Max started laughing and pressed the end of the joint up to my mouth. His fingers felt wet against my lips, and the joint was soggy and smelled so strong.

So I smoked with Cobie Petersen and Max Burgess, my American brother.

What could I do? I realized how sad and lonely I'd been here in America, and I would do anything to keep my brother Max moving toward me.

I inhaled.

The smoke tickled like frayed straw broom whisks inside me, but I managed to hold it in and even to exhale without coughing.

And Max said, “Welcome to America, little brother.”

“You're only sixteen days older than I am,” I pointed out.

Cobie Petersen softly punched me on my shoulder.

“I bet you've seen some messed-up shit,” Cobie Petersen said.

I thought about a time I'd spent with other orphan boys in a camp of tents. I thought about all the stories I'd been carrying with me.

“I've seen worse things than I can ever say.”

Max looked at me. There was something in his eyes. I could see it hurt him in some way to think about the reality of where I'd come from, and what was behind me. “Really?”

I didn't want to picture that time, but what could I do? I needed to change the subject, pick a different story from my library. So I nodded. “One time, I spent two days hiding inside a refrigerator.”

“That must have been cold,” Cobie said.

“It was broken. I only came out because I needed to pee.”

We smoked some more.

At first, I didn't feel a thing. But then a few minutes after inhaling the smoke, I had a sensation as though I were sitting in a perfect lukewarm current of water as it flowed and tickled every inch of my skin, tugging on me. It felt so wonderful.

Max grabbed the flashlight and shined it on my face.

“You're smiling,” he said.

“No I'm not.”

“Cobie. Look. Mister Silent is smiling.”

Cobie Petersen leaned into the light and confirmed Max's opinion.

“You're smiling, kid.”

I tried to regain my composure by concentrating on something real. I waved the copy of
Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species
in the center of the tight triangle we sat in.

“Look. This book. She's really crazy. Mrs. Nussbaum really
does
want to see all males die off. And she's doing research on
us
.”

“Us?” Max said.

“With girl sperm?” Cobie asked.

And then Cobie Petersen raised his hand and said, “Wait. Wait just a second. Have either of you guys ever in your life heard anything dumber than
girl sperm
?”

For the next hour—it may have only been thirty seconds, but then again, it felt as though it were much, much longer—I tried my hardest to explain to Cobie and Max what Mrs. Nussbaum detailed in her book, but I kept getting confused and lost, and saying the same things over and over.

Finally, Cobie Petersen told me: “Dude. Shut up. You're stoned. Max, I have created a monster.”

“The Dumpling Boy,” Max said.

“I made him start talking, and now he won't shut up.”

Which, for whatever reasons, made me suddenly obsess on something I'd been dying to ask Cobie Petersen.

I said, “Were you really telling the truth about the Dumpling Man getting you like that?” I pointed to Cobie's shoulder.

“It's all true. He pooed all over me, then dug his claws in right here.”

Cobie Petersen stretched out the neck of his T-shirt to bare the skin of his left shoulder. Max shined the flashlight's beam directly onto the pale moon of his shoulder, and Cobie traced an index finger along the track of the scar.

“Maybe when we get out of here, you and your brother can come up to Dumpling Run and the three of us will go coon hunting and look for the Dumpling Man again. Because he is real. I've heard all the stories, and most of them are pure horseshit, but not what I told you guys last week at scary story time. I really saw him. He really did this to me.”

“If you say so,” I said.

And Max added, “You never know.”

Cobie Petersen straightened his shirt and wobbled to his feet.

“We better get back to Jupiter before we end up in trouble.”

We found a place between three moss-covered boulders where we hid the things we'd stolen from the counselors' locker room. I didn't want to think about their reasons, but Max and Cobie decided they didn't want to leave Horace's condoms behind. And we laughed so hard we all nearly peed our pants when Max said he was going to go crazy if he didn't
stir up some of his favorite birthday pudding
pretty soon.

“How do you think up all these things?” I said.

Max shrugged and said, “It's like magic.”

Then we turned off the flashlight, stowed it with the rest of our loot, and, barefoot, stumbled back to Jupiter.

Before we came out of the woods, Max added, “And, Jesus, I am
really
hungry.”

That was something Max never said.

And Cobie Petersen told him, “We could go look for marshmallows in Earth.”

“Let's not,” Max answered.

Jupiter should have won
the interplanetary tug-of-war competition that afternoon—we normally would have—but three of Jupiter's boys were too tired after staying up most of the night, committing acts of thievery, reading terrifying nonfiction, and smoking pot in the woods.

It was the most fun I'd ever had in my life.

At least Max ate a big breakfast.

Cobie Petersen propped his elbows on the picnic table and cradled his face in his hands.

“I am so fucking tired. Why don't they let us sleep late like regular boys?”

Robin Sexton twitched his thumbs and rocked back and forth slightly, listening to nothing at all through his toilet-paper-and-kite-string earbuds.

Max spooned a blob of oatmeal he'd topped with milk and grape jelly into his mouth. “Look around you. Let me know if you see any
regular
boys here.”

“You should get stoned more often if it makes you eat like that,” I said.

Max bit into a bagel. “That fat camp summer almost killed me.”

“Mrs. Nussbaum says all us guys only have about fifty years to live anyway,” Cobie Petersen said. “We might as well try and die fat.”

Trent Mendibles, the boy with the hairiest legs anyone had ever seen, perked his head up and said, “Wait. You guys got stoned last night?”

“No,” Max said. “It was just a . . . uh . . . figure of speech.”

“Nothing's better than getting zombied out and blasting away assholes on BQTNP,” Trent said.

Trent Mendibles didn't think about many things.

“I have no idea what you're talking about, hairy gamer dude from Ohio,” Cobie Petersen mumbled into his hands.

“Hook me up with some weed. I want to get high,” Trent said.

Cobie and Max answered simultaneously, like they were singing the Jupiter-Jesus Boys song.

They said, “No.”

Trent Mendibles leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “Give me some. Or I'll tell Larry what you guys did.”

For a moment, it became deathly quiet at our table in the pavilion. I looked at Trent, then Max, and finally to Cobie. Robin Sexton seemed oblivious, as usual.

And Cobie Petersen raised his eyes from his palms and calmly told Trent Mendibles, “I will kill you when you're asleep tonight.”

Max added, “He will. Believe me. I'll help him.”

Trent Mendibles sat back on the bench. “You guys are fuckers.”

Then Cobie put his head down on the table and said, “Ariel. Go get me something to eat.”

Horace, Mars cabin's counselor, whose condoms were stolen the night before by Cobie Petersen and my brother Max, stood up at the Mars boys' table and bellowed, “All right! Clean up and get out to the rec field for competition!”

Cobie Petersen, the strongest boy at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, missed breakfast. It was going to cost our team significantly.

We five boys of Jupiter got dragged through the mud five times that day.

Cobie Petersen was our anchor. But he was useless—dead on his feet. We all were. Well, except for Robin Sexton and Trent Mendibles. But they were useless anyway.

I had played tug-of-war before; who hasn't? But I had no idea that at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys the game would involve a wide and deep pit of soupy mud. Every planet at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys destroyed our team in the contest. By the time the first four cabins had their way with us, our knees were scuffed and bloodied, our T-shirts were torn and hung from our shoulders like drapes of wet cement, and Robin Sexton was crying because he'd lost his shorts in the mud pit.

At least his earbuds stayed in.

Larry was mad at us—again—but this time it was for losing. If he suspected we'd done something wrong while we were supposed to have been sleeping the night before, he didn't show it. But to make matters worse, the final team to defeat the mud-coated boys of Jupiter was Mars. We were eliminated, humiliated, and out of clean clothes. Robin Sexton had to wallow around in the pit, feeling for his lost shorts.

Larry tossed everyone's sheets and duffel bags of clothes out Jupiter's screen door. He told us not to bother stepping foot in our cabin until everything was clean.

He banished the five of us to the disgusting showers, and afterward, we had to stand in the laundry room, wrapped in towels for two hours while we washed and dried all Jupiter's laundry. Actually, Max, Cobie, and I didn't stand so much as sit down and fall asleep on the damp concrete floor with our backs to the wall and our towels modestly and securely tucked between our legs.

- - -

Clean, dry, and a little bit bloodied, we came back home to Jupiter.

It was entirely unrealistic to have held out any hope that we'd be able to rest until dinnertime.

As soon as I came through the cabin door with my bag of everything I owned including the sheets for my plastic bed, Larry pointed an authoritative finger at my forehead.

“You. Marcel Marceau. Mrs. Nussbaum wants to see you in her office. You might as well get it over with, 'cause these four are waiting their turns right behind you. Get going. And she wants you to bring your index card.”

It was like having the wind knocked out of me. We all knew there would be some private one-on-one sessions with Mrs. Nussbaum during our stay at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, but it almost seemed brutally unfair that I was chosen to be the first boy from Jupiter to have to go.

Cobie Petersen patted my back. “Have fun, dude. And don't let her get any girl sperm in you. You never know what that shit might do to a guy.”

“Yeah,” Max agreed. “You never know.”

I was terrified and disgusted at the same time. How could I possibly face Mrs. Nussbaum after what I learned about her theories and her years of
scientific studies on a wide variety of males between the ages of twelve and seventeen years
?

I actually considered running off into the woods and attempting some form of escape. And it seemed to me that with every day that passed at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Bucky Littlejohn's act of desperation became more heroic and godlike.

Larry grabbed the duffel bag of laundry from my hands and tossed it onto my crumpling plastic-coated cot. Then he handed my folded index card to me.

“Suck it up, iceman,” he said. “You know where to go.”

- - -

Mrs. Nussbaum's office was in a small cottage located at the front gate to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. I took my time walking there. My stomach churned as I read the welcoming message on the gate.

Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys

Where Boys Rediscover the Fun of Boyhood!

I tried to anticipate the questions she might ask me, in order to prepare myself with evasive and shortened answers, but I kept thinking about her book and what kinds of horrible experiments she could possibly be conducting behind closed doors.

What could I do? There was no way out.

We were all doomed to extinction.

I stopped and chewed on my lip when I got to Mrs. Nussbaum's. I flipped my folded index card over and over inside my pocket. In fact, both my hands were tucked deeply into my pockets, which was something I never did.

A brass plate hung on the slatted siding by the front door. It said:
MARTHA NUSSBAUM, MD, PHD

And as soon as I stepped one foot onto the porch of her cottage, Mrs. Nussbaum flung the front door open and, in her high-pitched, wildly gleeful tone, squealed, “Ariel! So very nice to see you today! Come in! Come in!”

Mrs. Nussbaum looked like an enormous sock puppet in her white lab smock.

“You said it wrong,” I said.

“Huh?”

“My name. It's
Ah
-riel,” I pointed out.

“Oh! That sounds lovely when you say it!”

Then she repeated my name three times—a kind of witch's curse, I thought—and told me three more times to
come in! come in! come in!