“But this is a crisis.”
“I’ll miss you, but I can’t live with her anymore. My cousin offered me a job here. You are a great son,” Duarte added, breaking down.
When Cory told Greer, she said, “How can he just do that?”
“You’ll have to ask him yourself, if you happen to see him again.”
“You can stay here with me as long as you want, you know,” she said. “My parents barely notice that you’re in the house. Or that I am.”
“Don’t you have to go back down to New York soon? Your job?” he asked her.
“It’ll keep.”
“Greer, you blew off your summit. I can’t believe that you did that. That I made you do that.”
“You didn’t make me. I wanted to.”
“But they needed you there, right?” She didn’t say anything. “Did they say it went okay?”
“Yes,” she said. “It went great.”
“Was Faith Frank angry with you?” he persisted.
“Cory,” said Greer, “I’m here of my own free will, okay? Don’t worry.”
Over the next day and a half, back at his own house, he watched YouTube clips of the panels and speeches at the summit, and tracked down various Loci hashtags and mentions, some of which were nasty, accusing the foundation of taking “blood money” from ShraderCapital, but most of which were enthusiastic. “What great energy at the Centauri Center,” someone wrote. “Amazing event,” someone else wrote, and there were more details about how dynamic the speakers were and how responsive the audience was.
He watched the video of Faith Frank’s keynote. She was unequivocally sexy at sixty-eight. He liked her boots; they had a hint of kink about them. Her speech was intense and serious and witty and rapturously received, and he understood why Greer would be so into her. Women sometimes liked to be dazzled by other women; he thought that if he were a woman, he would be into Faith Frank too.
Then he watched the others, all female: the astronaut, the naval commander, the hip-hop artist, the poet whose collection about poverty in America had just won an important prize. Some of the speakers were earnest and well-meaning; others, like the poet, were thrilling. Plus, there was an impressive multimedia aspect: enormous wraparound screens showing the speakers out and about in their real lives, and excellent acoustics when a girls’ choir from the South Side of Chicago sang. Emmett Shrader had spent a lot of money on this, and Greer had missed it all. He felt terrible about it, despite her reassurances.
One morning his mother rose up from her bed and came into the kitchen, where Greer and Cory sat with his aunt Maria. “What’s going on, Mom?” he asked warily. “What do you need?”
“I feel the spirit of Alby,” she announced. “Gênio Dois. He is here. He wants me to shed my skin.” She held out her arms and showed them the marks where she had been pulling and scratching at her skin. Later, online, Cory would read about psychotic breaks in the context of mourning. Now he just stared at his mother and couldn’t think of anything to say to her.
She needed supervision; that was what the aunts and uncles decided. They did what they could, calling her employers and telling them she couldn’t make it to work. But they had their own lives and families, and none of them could stay on in Macopee much longer. Even Greer felt she finally had to get back to work, and Cory said of course she had to go.
“What about you?” she asked him the next time they were alone.
“I think I’m going to stick around.”
“Really? Can you do that?”
“What do you mean? It’s what I have to do.”
“Okay,” she said unsurely.
“What?” he finally said. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s just that I’m concerned about you, Cory. It shouldn’t all fall on you like this.”
“But it does, Greer.”
“I think you’re an amazing son,” she said, but this didn’t seem at all like a compliment to him.
“Right, I’m amazing,” he said tightly. “I’m incredibly amazing. And now I have to stay.”
* * *
? ? ?
Alby’s room called to Cory with the strange ferocity of sound waves coming from deep inside a cave. He had ignored the room until now, but then once the relatives were gone and he had officially moved back into the house and called to quit his job at Armitage & Rist, shocking his employers (his immediate supervisor had said, “You’re really giving all of this up? No one does that”), he was pulled toward the room his brother had inhabited.
And then, once he went inside, he couldn’t stay away. Cory sat for a long time on the blue rug, with his old bobblehead basketball player figurines above him on the shelf, nodding vigorously at the slightest footfall, and with Alby’s action figures scattered all around. One had an arm raised; one was kicking nothing; one had its torso twisted all the way around into an impossible stance; all of them were frozen into their last, permanent positions.
Cory had also taken out Alby’s school papers and drawings and notebooks, and was obsessively reading everything, as if there might be clues to be found there and decoded, which would prove, somehow, that his little brother was actually still alive in some until-now-undisclosed location elsewhere in the world. This was the fantasy Cory had constructed; it relieved him to linger in it.
Alby’s handwriting was large and erratic, and his teacher had constantly circled words in red pen, admonishing him, “Try to be neater, Alberte.” But the content of Alby’s work was sophisticated, occasionally even long-winded. In his class essays he expounded on dinosaurs and Incans and the Big Bang, using statistics to back up his work, but still he digressed. “Try to stay on topic, Alberte,” wrote that same teacher, and Cory wanted to punch her in the nose.
Then there were the notebooks. At first he didn’t understand what they were, or what purpose they served. There were three of them in a pile, with that familiar black-and-white egg-drop pattern common to school notebooks everywhere. When Cory opened the first one it appeared to be a kind of homemade spreadsheet. In his brother’s enormous and childlike but highly controlled handwriting were cryptic stats and notes:
AUG. 6
10 AM
TEMPERATURE: 76 DEGREES
15 MINS OBSERVATION
MOTION: SOME
DISTANCE: 4 CENTIMITERS
VELOSITY: (4 CM DIVIDED BY 15 = .27)
AUG. 7
RAIN!! NO OBSERVATION
STAYED INSIDE WITH PLAYSTATION INSTED
AUG. 8
10 AM
TEMPERATURE: 82 DEGREES
15 MINS OBSERVATION
MOTION: NONE
DISTANCE: NONE
VELOSITY: NONE
NOTES: DOES TEMPERATURE AFFECT DISTANCE AND VELOCITY? CHANNEL 22 NEWS SAYS THERES A HEAT WAVE COMING THIS WEEKEND, SUPPOSABLY! THEY ARE OFTEN 100% WRONG. WE WILL SEE WHAT HAPPENS.
And then, on the weekend, there were further statistics, with the notation, “WAVED FRONT LEFT ARM. DISTRESS? CANT BE SURE.”
Front left arm. Cory didn’t know what he had meant.
And then he did. He was seized by comprehension and immediately horrified, like someone who has driven hours from his home and then suddenly remembers he’s left a pot on the stove. Cory shot up into a standing position. Frantic, he looked around the room. No one had been in here since Alby died except for one of the aunts, who had straightened up a little. In the corner on the floor by the window was a box. He crouched down and opened it; inside was a little empty bowl and a few pieces of old, dried-out meat. This was Alby’s pet turtle Slowy’s home—Slowy, who had been entirely forgotten, and was now missing.