The Alex Crow by Andrew Smith
I was sitting on the dryer, reading, while our clothes tumbled around below me. It was a warm place to sit. The dryer stopped. A buzzer rang.
Cobie Petersen slapped my knee and said, “How’s the girl sperm book ending up?”
“It’s really weird,” I said. “I think the people at Alex Division have an obsession with control. Controlling everything.”
“Let me see,” Cobie said.
Max grabbed the book from my hands, but let it slip and fall to the floor with a damp thud.
“Sorry,” he said.
“You’re drunk,” I said.
Cobie Petersen laughed. “Duh! And he’s a pervert, too.”
Max bent down and picked the book up, opening to its title page.
“Holy crap, Ariel. Did you see this?”
And Max held the book right in front of my legs, so we all could see the smearing wet inscription on the title page. It said this:
I hope you’re enjoying my book, Ariel!
—M.K. Nussbaum
“I bet the book’s chipped,” Max said.
Chipping was what our father called it when the Alex Division people turned animals into biodrones. It’s why Mrs. Nussbaum examined the three of us so closely when we had our private therapy sessions with her. She was looking to see if there was any sign one or all of us were actually being used by Merrie-Seymour Research Group to keep watch on her, or on anyone else for that matter. It stood to reason that if they could chip a cat or a crow, they could chip a book, too. Or a boy.
I nearly choked. What could I say? I looked from Max, to Cobie, and back to my brother. They looked scared. I was scared. Mrs. Nussbaum was watching me.
And outside, thunder exploded, and the rain poured down so hard the roar on the roof was nearly deafening.
Then Cobie Petersen said what I was thinking—but what I did not want to hear.
“Or one of us is chipped.”
At exactly that moment the door to the laundry room opened. I nearly jumped out of the towel I was wrapped in, convinced that I’d see Mrs. Nussbaum coming for us. But in walked a dripping Kyle Breckenridge, the red-bearded lad from Mars who’d called us fags when he saw us in the showers. He was wrapped in a soaked bedsheet and wearing only his boxers, carrying an armload of wet laundry.
The Mars boys’ rain strategy was not very intelligent.
Cobie Petersen looked at him. I could tell our general was already formulating a plan. We pulled our warm trunks out of the dryer and put them on.
“Did you lose the go-do-the-Mars-boys’-laundry bet, fucker?” Cobie asked.
Kyle Breckenridge had obviously made the same assumption we had when we left Jupiter to go drink beer in the woods: that nobody else at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys would go outside in the torrent of the storm.
He was scared and alone.
And he remained scared and alone until the storm broke and the dinner bell rang and people found him, because Cobie Petersen put Kyle Breckenridge in an arm lock and wrestled the struggling kid outside into the dining pavilion, where Max and Cobie duct-taped Kyle Breckenridge in his underwear to one of the roof’s outer support posts in the perfect spot where a steady stream of rainwater hosed down on the kid from Mars.
They also threw all the Mars boys’ laundry and sheets into the mud.
While Cobie Petersen and Max put the finishing touches on their living gargoyle, I decided I really wanted to read about Dr. Merrie’s Siberian Ice Man, but I wasn’t going to carry that book around after I saw what Mrs. Nussbaum had written in it. So I tore out the title page and most of the chapter about the Ice Man, and then I buried Mrs. Nussbaum’s book at the bottom of a garbage can filled with disgusting, half-eaten lunch leftovers.
After I abandoned the abridged version of Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species, I tucked my stolen pages beneath my garbage-bag rain slicker and into the waist of my swim trunks. Cobie Petersen leaned in and put his hand on Kyle Breckenridge’s bare shoulder and told him, “Next time you feel like calling someone names, just remember this romantic walk in the rain you took with me, dude. And, dude. Really. You should shave.”
Of course Kyle Breckenridge cried and screamed the entire time he was out there strapped down in his underwear and getting rained on, but nobody could hear him; or if they could, nobody wanted to come outside in all this foul weather.
Everyone thought it was such a great Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys rainy-day prank!
THE CABOOSE OF NATURAL SELECTION
I have lived, and lived, and lived again.
I could not tell this to anyone, Max. I only hope it is not unfair of me to tell you.
I’m doing this now because you’ve asked me to. Other people have tried to get me to tell them about my first lives, but I have always kept the terrible stories locked inside my library. I realize we have become brothers in this, and I hope it doesn’t weigh you down. I’m not trying to give you anything you’ll have to carry around for the rest of your life, but that’s what happens to us after all, isn’t it? We carry story upon story upon story.
We carry our stories because we survive, and survival is ultimately the most selfish thing we do. It is the opposite of extinction, after all.
- - -
The small family with the wagon shared everything they had with me.
In the most immediate sense, what they shared was their food and water. They gave me the clothes I changed into—the first real things I had to wear since the day I crawled inside that refrigerator. They also gave me the story of the boy whose name was Ocean. But what was lifesaving to me, I think, was Garen’s and Emel’s willingness to allow me to be with them in that difficult space between leaving everything behind and going toward something that was unknown to all of us. I don’t know why they took me with them, or maybe I’m afraid to guess why—that they did this because I reminded them of a boy who’d been killed for cursing God.
Still, I don’t know where I would have gone if they hadn’t allowed me to walk with them.
I will tell you this: When we came over the final pass in the mountains and stood at the edge of the road we’d been following, I looked out across the endless plain of the flat valley below and what appeared there, clouded in the haze of salty dust, was bigger than any city I’d ever seen. I saw a settlement that had been built beside some orchards. It spanned outward in perpendicular arrow-straight rows of perfect soft boxes that, once we came down from the rise and were close enough to see, turned out to be tents—all of them stamped in blue letters: UNHCR.
I could also see how the city of tents had been enclosed within a ring of heavy chain-link fence. There was something about that fence—I think—that said stay out, from whatever side you looked at it. Stay out of here; stay out of there, like it was an island surrounded by ice.
I had been pulling the wagon down from the pass, but when we got closer to the entry gate to the city of tents, Garen took the handle from me and trudged forward.
“I want to know something.” I said, “We agree that it is impossible to think about the future or God when someone is shooting at you, right? I wonder if you can think about the future now?”
Garen paused a moment and shook his head.
“No.”
“Can you think about God?” I asked.
“No. What about you? Can you think about those things?”
“I’ve been trying to,” I said. “Nothing comes to me, though. I think it’s too hard to think of anything you haven’t seen before.”
“You could, but it’s almost as though you would have to make up a new language to do something like that,” Garen told me. “How could you make up words for things you’ve never seen?”
“Sometimes I think about that, too,” I admitted.
We only carry old words.
The closer we got to the sprawling city of t
I asked one of the guards what UNHCR stood for. His answer was, “Hey! You speak English really good!”
“It can’t possibly stand for that,” I said.
The guard smiled and told me this was the United Nations Refugee Agency.
I didn’t really know what he meant by refugee. Were we looking for refuge; or were we running away from something, so we didn’t care where we ended up, refuge or none? I had only run away once, from Thaddeus at the gate, and I was pretty sure Garen and Emel and their baby had only run away one time as well; and I think that they did it reluctantly. So who could say why, exactly, we had come here, and what hopeful refuge the place might offer?
We went into the city of tents. At that time I had no idea how long I would end up living there. How could anyone know that?
Garen and his family followed a few paces behind me with their wagon. We passed through a chute formed between two long tents that were built so they butted up to the chain-link fence at either side of the gate. At the end of this chute stood more guards carrying rifles.
The first guard asked how many of us there were in my family, and I told him that we were not a family. I saw a sign at the end of the chute with two opposing arrows on it, one labeled FAMILIES and the other ORPHANS AND INDIVIDUALS.
I pointed back at Garen and Emel and their baby with my thumb.
“They are a family,” I said. “I only followed them here.”
“Do you have a family?” the guard asked.
I shook my head.
“Okay, then. It will be okay, boy. What’s your name?”
“Ariel.”
“Okay, Ariel. Let’s come with me.”
The man took me away, to the tent on the right side of the chute. I looked back at Garen and Emel, who were talking to another guard. I waved to them as I went inside the long tent.
I never saw the little family with the wagon again after that moment.
I spent the next nine months in a tent filled with orphan boys, my next family. The oldest among us were sixteen or seventeen years old; the youngest ones were three. This arrangement—the hierarchy of an exclusively male society—put me in a very difficult spot of having to do whatever the older, bigger boys told me to do. This mostly included taking care of the babies—the smallest boys who could not do anything for themselves—or stealing from the other families living in the tent city, cleaning up after the older boys, and so on.
It was a painfully difficult nine months. The tent was pregnant with filth and unfairness.
I was born again when Major Knott took me away from that place.
- - -
Igor Zelinsky, Leonard Fountain, was a pus-oozing nuclear leper, emitting enough radiation that if you stuffed his clothes with popcorn kernels, you could open up a fucking movie house. At least, that’s what Joseph Stalin told him.
Joseph Stalin was angry about all the time the melting man was wasting.
Mistakes are the locomotive engine of natural selection. Leonard Fountain was its caboose.
Up in the sky above the highway, a rectangular prism glinted in the sunlight as it hovered, watching Leonard Fountain, watching as he drove, accompanied and alone through the Kentucky woods.
And Crystal Lutz, playing the William Tell Overture on her accordion, rode along with the melting man.
SIM
MONDAY, MARCH 5, 1888—NEW YORK
We have settled into what we both hope are permanent accommodations in the Empire Hotel, a remarkable establishment owned by our benefactor and investor, Mr. Jonathan Seymour.
The icehouse below contains enough food provisions to last the entire establishment one full year—an untested claim that Mr. Seymour is proud to make—and remains at a constant temperature sufficient to preserve our friend, Mr. Katkov’s beast.
Poor Katkov. And still, after these years, Warren and I continue to refer to the thing as Katkov’s Beast.
Since Mr. Seymour brought us to New York, we have placed the small man in permanent storage. Jonathan Seymour and I have engaged in partnership, the purpose of which is to fund scientific and medical research. And here we are again—research! The arrogant endeavor to control more and more of our shrinking world.
I have opened a small medical practice as well, and my dear Mr. Ripley Reed Warren has returned to his passion—he writes for the New-York Times.
We are very happy here; the city is magnificent.
I must admit that it took a good deal of persuasion—and no small amount of financial enticement—for Mr. Seymour to entice us to agree to a sea voyage to America, but when all had been said and done, Mr. Warren and I both arrived at the conclusion that shipping advancements have provided some remarkable improvements since our ordeal on the Alex Crow, some eight or so years ago.
We have come very far.
In settling into our new home together at Mr. Seymour’s Empire Hotel, I have had more than several personal meetings with the man. He is quite odd, not to the point of being a danger, and I am entirely convinced it is the effect on his psychology of living in such opulence and comfort. In any event, it is Jonathan Seymour’s peculiar conviction—as the deranged Mr. Murdoch had theorized when we first saw the beast on the Lena Delta—that our little ice man is some earthly incarnation of Satan himself.
What I believe to be the origin of Katkov’s devil is of little consequence. Consider this: The thing did not exist at all in the eyes of the world until I rescued it from his icebound prison. In doing so, I feel endlessly confident the small man is destined to serve some greater, as yet undiscovered, purpose.
Satan or aberration of nature, let Seymour believe what he chooses—including the preposterous concept that the cells and the structures of Katkov’s creature can somehow be, in his words, “reinvigorated.”
Despite the gloomy weather that hovers over the city, there is a promise of spring in the air, and with it Mr. Warren and I share a hopeful optimism for our future here at the Empire.
R.R.W. and I walked together through the park and dined before bed.
TUESDAY, MARCH 13, 1888—NEW YORK
The terrifying irony of our situation has come full circle, hasn’t it, my dear?
From ice, to ice, fooling ourselves as always.
I think I will die without you. This is hell.
This morning came the news that Mr. Warren had been found. We are trapped inside the Empire, whose lower floors are nearly buried in snow. The city is without heat and electricity, and travel is impossible due to the snowdrifts, some of which exceed twenty feet in depth.
Yesterday afternoon, my great friend Ripley Reed Warren left the Empire Hotel, determined to go to the offices of the Times, and he never came back to me. I was so consumed with worry, but had convinced myself Mr. Warren had taken shelter at his place of employment. The police came to notify us today that R.R.W. had been discovered buried in a bank of snow on Seventh Avenue. He must have stumbled in the tremendous winds and was swallowed by the relentless snowfall.
This is the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me.
What will I do now?
What will I do now?
- - -
From Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species:
In early 2002, Dr. Jacob Burgess, a senior research scientist employed by MSRG and working within the semiautonomous Alex Division’s de-extinction laboratory, obtained approval from Chief Operating Officer Harrison Knott to investigate the viability of reversing the extinction of a hominid species that was discovered and preserved by Alexander Merrie during an Arctic expedition in 1881.
Burgess had successfully produced
The hominid specimen—Merrie’s so-called Siberian Ice Man (SIM)—was a unique individual of undetermined classification and origin. No similar specimens had ever been reported as having existed. Merrie’s original drawings of the SIM animal detail proportional skeletal and muscular characteristics that suggest the primate, which stood erect at a height of 1.15 meters (45 inches), was entirely bipedal, and walked upright. Furthermore, the SIM organism preserved by Alexander Merrie was a fully formed adult male.
Although photographic and filmic verification of the creature exist, MSRG/Alex have not publicly released documentation to verify the presence of Merrie’s original SIM specimen. Archival searches of the Illustrated London News from 1881 provide one illustration of the specimen on display at an entertainment venue near Whitechapel. The striking feature of Merrie’s Siberian Ice Man is that the creature appears to have short, thick horns growing from the animal’s occipitofrontal skull.
Dr. Burgess himself cannot respond to inquiries regarding the SIM de-extinction attempt, citing contractual obligations to MSRG/Alex, although the records of other de-extinction programs are a matter of public record. Dr. Burgess, Harrison Knott, and Colton Petersen, legal counsel, subsequently testified to the joint congressional Committee on Environmental Anthropogenesis in 2008 as to the results of those well-publicized de-extinction trials. Former and current MSRG/Alex employees, however, verify that Burgess’s experiment succeeded in producing a viable male SIM offspring—an exact living replica of Merrie’s 1880 discovery.