The Alex Crow by Andrew Smith
The de-extinction process for vertebrates generally depended on the laboratory formation of a viable blastocyst developed in vitro, then monitored and sustained for a period of five to ten days.
The first SIM blastocysts, produced from active stem cells whose nuclei were redesigned with a fully diploidal set of SIM chromosomes, had been implanted in common chimpanzees, but the pregnancies never came to term. According to sources actively employed at MSRG/Alex in 2002, Burgess implanted a ten-day-old SIM blastocyst into his own wife, who was newly pregnant with Dr. Burgess’s own child, a son, named Max.
THE BOOK OF MAX AND COBIE
“The book is worse than chipped. It’s about you,” I said.
“What do you mean, it’s about me?” Max asked.
Cobie Petersen raised his hand and waited patiently for us to pay attention to him. “If it’s about Max, is there stuff in it about him dealing himself a hand of solitaire?”
Sometimes talking to Cobie Petersen and Max was pointless, unless I wanted to talk about masturbation, which is something I truly never wanted to talk about.
“Hey,” Max said. “Did you just make that one up yourself?”
Cobie Petersen nodded. “Yep.”
“I like it. Solitaire. That’s pretty damn good,” Max said.
“Thanks. I tried, man. It’s been fun.”
“Got any more?”
“I wrote down a few more on Mrs. Nussbaum’s index card.”
“She’s going to think all we ever do is drop off our babies at the fire station.”
“Dude. That’s totally gross,” Cobie said.
Max laughed. He was stoned. Well, we all were, actually.
If there was anything at all redeeming or hopeful in our condemnation to the hell of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, it was that I finally felt as though Max and I were brothers, and for the first time since coming to America, I believed I had made a friend in Cobie Petersen. On the other hand, I was completely sick of shared open toilets, beanie-weenie casserole, taking showers with other boys in a spider cave, and sleeping every night next to four other Jupiter kids and our snoring, inattentive counselor Larry.
It was past midnight, and the three of us had snuck away from Jupiter and hiked around to the opposite side of the canoe lake to smoke a joint. The heat and humidity were smothering, and bugs were everywhere, flying into our hair, pelting our skin, diving into the flashlight beam that shined on the pages I read.
We sat on the shore, shirtless, with our bare feet in the water.
I sighed and waved the pages I’d torn from Mrs. Nussbaum’s book in front of Max’s face. “I’m not kidding, Max. She even mentions your dad, too, Cobie. Look.”
Since it was past midnight, it was technically the morning of the second day of our final week at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. Our parents would be arriving on Saturday to take us home to beds that were not covered in plastic, and bathrooms with private showers and doors we could lock.
Still, if there was a light at the end of the tunnel, it wasn’t shining bright enough for most of us to see.
The day after the thunderstorm hit during week four, the interplanetary games had resumed. As I suspected, Jupiter won the swim relays, but just barely. Robin Sexton would only paddle with one arm because he was afraid of getting lake water in his mouth. Cobie Petersen had told us he peed in the lake at least once or twice every day during swim practice, and Max couldn’t resist adding that he could swim and also conjure the microscopic spirits of millions of future Maxes all at the same time. Max confidently told us there was so much of his sperm in the canoe lake that we’d all better keep an eye out for the Pequod. This was one of those things that neither Robin Sexton nor Trent Mendibles understood, since Max’s reference to the Pequod didn’t have anything to do with video games or online social networking platforms. But the comments about all the sperm and pee in the lake were among those things that Robin Sexton selectively chose to “hear.” So Robin Sexton kept one hand firmly pressed over his mouth, which made him swim in circles somewhat, and slowed down Jupiter’s relay team significantly.
And Trent Mendibles told Max, “You’re such a freak. I hate you so much. I can’t wait to get the hell away from you assholes.”
I chose not to believe Max’s claim about all the sperm he’d deposited in the canoe lake. Well, most of it. Who could ever tell with Max, though? But I was certain every boy at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had peed in the canoe lake at least once. What could anyone do about it? It was camp, and camp was brutal.
I’d almost forgotten about the chapter I’d stuffed into the bottom of my duffel bag until I got down to the last of my clean laundry. In any event, reading it around Larry or the other boys would have caused trouble, so I decided to take it along with us when Cobie Petersen asked me and Max to sneak out of Jupiter with him one last time before the liberation of the campers.
“Liberating the campers sounds like slang for jerking off, too,” Max had said.
Cobie Petersen took a big drag from the joint and passed it over to Max.
“I’m really going to miss you guys when they let us go home this week,” Cobie said.
“Dude. Don’t be dumb.” Max told him, “We live three miles away. We can walk to your place. Let’s hang out as soon as we get back.”
“You should read this,” I said.
“Dude. I’m too stoned to read,” Cobie Petersen answered.
“I can never remember what I read when I’m high, even if I like it,” Max said. He exhaled a big billowing cloud out over the water of the canoe lake. “You should just tell us about it.”
So I tried my best, despite how stoned I was, to explain to Cobie Petersen and Max what I’d read in the chapter about the Siberian Ice Man from Mrs. Nussbaum’s Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species.
Apparently, according to Mrs. Nussbaum, Natalie Burgess—my American mother—gave birth by Caesarean section to my brother Max and a de-extincted Arctic ape man on the same day in a medical lab at Merrie-Seymour Research Group/Alex Division. This happened to also be sixteen days before I was born on the other side of the world, in a place that was arguably less civilized than Sunday, West Virginia, or America, for that matter. We didn’t have frozen ape men, snore walls, and de-extincted worms or crows where I lived in my first life.
But the Siberian Ice Man, who had been dead and extinct, had come back to the people of earth, thanks to my godlike American father and the equally godlike people at Alex Division.
I hadn’t known Natalie Burgess very long, but who could ever get to know that woman, anyway? I can only imagine she thought that being a surrogate birth chamber to some other species of animal—Mrs. Nussbaum called him SIM—was “no big deal,” or something people simply shouldn’t make a fuss over.
She would be fine.
Natalie would always be fine, as long as nobody paid any attention to her.
The chapter called “The Strange Case of Dr. Alexander Merrie’s Siberian Ice Man” claimed that both babies—Max and SIM—were healthy and thrived under the care of the Burgesses. Natalie even breastfed the de-extincted creature.
No big deal.
The SIM, however, matured more rapidly than his human womb-mate, Max, so that by the time both boys were approaching two years in age, the SIM was in the middle of puberty, sexually developed, and had sprouted horns. He was also completely unmanageable, frequently climbed on top of Natalie—and even Max—in almost constant attempts to have sex, and had caused significant destruction to the Burgesses’ home. And again, I am certain Natalie would have thought it not too much bother at all.
The sources who provided information to Mrs. Nussbaum for her book also confirmed that the SIM disappeared around the time it would have turned two years old. Vanished. The general theory was that Jake Burgess, my American father, and Alex Division had decided to euthanize th
Natalie Burgess probably didn’t mind that so much, either.
“Awww . . . ,” Max said, “I had a twin brother? And he was horny all the time, too. That must be where I get it from. That kind of gives me a boner.”
Max grabbed his crotch and adjusted himself.
“Dude. You’re high,” Cobie Petersen told him. “It was a monkey.”
“Or something,” I said.
“Anyway, Mrs. Nussbaum’s stupid,” Max said. “Alex Division doesn’t euthanize the majority of the Alex animals. They turn them into biodrones.”
“Sounds like nobody at Alex Division knows what the other people there are doing,” I said.
“Which is probably why they chipped one of us. Or all of us,” Cobie Petersen added.
My stomach churned.
“Don’t say that,” I said.
Cobie Petersen stood up, wobbling just a bit. He said, “I’m going swimming.”
“You’ll get all your shit wet. Then you’ll have to sleep in wet underwear,” Max said.
“Not if I take them off first.”
Max shook his head. “Skinny-dipping? That’s pretty gay.”
“Dude. They make us take showers together. Skinny-dipping in the lake after midnight is probably the least gay thing we’ve done all day at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.”
Cobie Petersen had a point.
So we all stripped off our clothes and jumped into the cool water, where I set adrift the pages I’d torn from Mrs. Nussbaum’s book.
I’M STILL THE SAME OLD GUY I’VE ALWAYS BEEN
“You are driving. You are driving, and you haven’t slept in two days, Leonard,” 3-60 said.
It was true. Ever since the melting man left the woods near Slemp, Kentucky, he’d been driving nonstop, and was now somewhere east of a place called Beckley, West Virginia. The lava, red-eared turtles, and kangaroos had gone away, but the hotel inside Leonard Fountain’s head remained as full of noisy tenants as it had ever been.
Leonard Fountain wanted to pull over and sleep.
“Keep driving, you idiot!” Joseph Stalin said.
“Where are my timers? Where are my timers?” the melting man said.
“You left your timers in the back of the van, Leonard,” 3-60 said.
“Keep driving! Enough of these distractions!” Joseph Stalin scolded.
“You are pulling over. You are pulling over,” 3-60 narrated.
And Crystal Lutz began playing the Wedding March on her accordion.
“You are getting out of the car,” 3-60 said.
“Van. It’s a van,” the melting man corrected.
“You are getting out of the van.”
“Quick! Look up!” Joseph Stalin said.
The melting man did as he was told. He stood in the middle of the road, and when he looked up he saw the thing in the sky that had been following him. But this time, the rectangular metal object did not vanish, it hovered a while, making the faintest buzzing sound, as though to say to the melting man that it knew he could see it, and it wanted Leonard Fountain to know it was watching him, too.
Then it rotated and disappeared.
An old station wagon whizzed past in the opposing lane. It honked at Leonard Fountain.
“Don’t forget you are standing in the middle of a road,” 3-60 told him.
“I won’t forget I’m standing in the middle of a road,” Leonard Fountain said.
“And the speed limit here is sixty miles per hour,” 3-60, who was always so pleasant and patient, reminded him.
Leonard Fountain unlatched the rear gate on his atomic U-Haul and climbed into the sweltering toxic steam of the cargo area to look for his timers, and maybe some of the used clothing he’d bought when he met Crystal Lutz in the thrift store.
He heard something.
“Your phone is ringing, Leonard,” 3-60 told him.
“Huh?”
Nobody ever called the melting man.
“Don’t answer it,” Joseph Stalin said.
“I want to see who it is,” Leonard Fountain protested.
It wasn’t easy to find the phone, despite the ringing and ringing. The phone was buried beneath some of the filthy clothes the melting man had discarded up in Mom’s Attic one time when he wasn’t actually having sex with Crystal Lutz, but believed that he was.
“Huh . . . Hello?” the melting man said.
“Lenny? Is that you, Lenny? You’ve been calling this week. Sorry I missed your calls. I can’t really carry a phone with me here at camp. The fuckhead kids I work with will steal it.”
The melting man recognized the voice. It made him so happy to hear from his little brother.
“Larry? My gosh! Larry? How’ve you been?”
“Good, man. Good. Just dealing with a bunch of little shits here is all.”
“Where are you?”
“Ah. I work at a summer camp for assholes. It’s in the George Washington National Forest, right on the border of Virginia and West Virginia.”
The melting man said, “Hey! I’m in West Virginia right now! I’d love to see you.”
“No!” Joseph Stalin said.
“Really? That would be terrific, Lenny. It’s been, what? Three years since I’ve seen you? I bet you’ve changed.”
“Naw. I’m still the same old guy I’ve always been,” the melting man, who had lost every hair on his body, and was covered with pus-oozing lesions, said. “I need to check the map. Where are you at, exactly?”
“The place is called Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. It’s just a couple miles north of Lake Moomaw.”
“Hang on. Let me write that down. Lake . . .”
“Beaver Dam,” Joseph Stalin said.
“Moomaw,” Larry said.
“You are writing. You are writing,” 3-60 said.
“What’s up, Lenny? Is something wrong?” Larry asked his brother.
“Oh. Uh. Nothing,” the melting man said. “Look, give me a day or so, Larry. Is there anything I can bring you?”
Larry laughed. “Heh-heh. Yeah. A girl to screw. I’m so fucking horny here. This place smells like balls, and there’s nothing but goddamned boys.”
When Larry said boys, Leonard Fountain thought he said beavers.
Leonard Fountain wrote down Camp Merrie-Seymour for Beavers, located a couple miles north of Lake Beaver Dam.
Leonard Fountain was melting.
A LITTLE GAME OF STONES IN A GRID
A seventeen-year-old boy named Isaak ruled over the twelve other—thirteen, counting me—orphan boys who lived inside a drafty, leaking tent that became my home. This was my next family, Max, and it was not good. Isaak was a terrible, cruel, and demanding tyrant.
But what could I do?
This was the way things were now.
Let me tell you what it was like to live inside a tent full of orphans for those nine months. It was worse than being in a refrigerator. And it was as though every one of us were waiting to be born into a new life again.
Unlike the others who lived in the city of tents, the orphans came here without people or connections. We were the true refugees—waiting for the opportunity to run away again and again—and we had nothing to speak of, which is why Isaak and three of the other older boys—his sergeants—forced us to steal. It didn’t matter what we stole, either; we only had to give things to the four boys who ran the tent just to keep them from beating us or taking what little we had—the clothes off our backs, our shoes. If they got mad enough, and a boy had already been stripped of his jacket and shoes, they would hover near at mealtimes so you would know not to touch your food or they would beat you at night.
They did worse things than that to some of us, too. And
I will say that I had a sense of hope when I came there. Garen and Emel had given me new clothes to wear, the guards were nice and they spoke English to me, but when I entered the tent—the new boy among the thirteen others who lived there—I saw what this next life was going to be like.
The floor of the tent was covered with blue plastic tarps. I found out this was because so much water would seep in through the tent’s seams during the winters when it rained and snowed. Against one wall was a stack of thin mats—the beds we’d sleep on, that had to be picked up every morning to save them from being trampled on and torn. There was a broom and several buckets—one for cleaning the floor (I found out all about this one), and two for carrying water in for the boys. The only other thing in the tent was an oil-burning heater that stood in the center of the floor.
There was nothing else inside, except for some of the boys who hadn’t gone outside to play, to beg, or perhaps to steal things for Isaak and his friends. And as soon as I walked in, accompanied by a guard with a UNHCR patch on his uniform, all the collective eyes in the tent looked at me with suspicion and contempt. At least, it felt that way to me. How could I be certain? But I did learn from my American brother Max that no boy welcomes the addition of another boy with whom he might have to share his space—or anything else for that matter.
This was the new order of things.
The four older boys were sitting cross-legged on the floor. They were playing a little game where they tossed stones into a grid they had drawn on the tarp.
One of the orphan boys pointed at me and tossed a stone at my foot. “What’s the dead boy’s name?”
At first, I thought he might have recognized the clothes I was wearing and mistaken me for the boy named Ocean. I realized this was an absurd thought.