I look at her. “What did you find?”
Surprise and faint embarrassment flicker across her face, like I’ve snuck up behind her while she’s journaling. But the look is gone so quickly I can’t be sure I didn’t imagine it. “Just a piece of paper,” she says. “Just some words.”
She hops onto her bike and kicks it to life. I follow her into the woods.
WE
THE BOY is getting hungry.
He floats between states, almost perfectly balanced between Living and Dead, almost unreachable to the demands of either, but only almost. He has walked hundreds of miles without consuming any form of energy, and one can only defy physics for so long. His balance is beginning to tremble.
He doesn’t remember the last time he ate. His past is an unreadable mess, like a book shredded and glued back together. A big man and a tall man and a family of skeletons. Then other Dead people. A blur of blank faces and unfamiliar rooms. Passed from hand to hand, cared for, fed a few bits of meat, then forgotten in a dark hallway, picked up by someone else, fed, and forgotten.
We can’t decipher these soggy collages, so we skip ahead to the new pages, to where he smelled a new scent rippling through the airport, new sounds echoing through the halls, voices and laughter and scratchy old music. He saw the change around him, felt it creeping into him, and he pushed it out. It felt unearned, inadequate, like a father apologizing for a beating by offering a hug. He wasn’t ready to embrace this supposedly new world. He didn’t trust its open arms.
Now he is far away from that world, deep in the forest and more alone than he’s ever been, if loneliness can be measured in miles. This stretch of highway has been untouched for so long the forest has started to reclaim it, smoothing it back into the green expanse like a fading scar. Young pines shoot through the pavement as their parents’ roots break it up for them. Slabs, then shards, then pebbles, then sand. He can feel the looseness of things here, so far from the lattice of other minds. He sees vacillations in the corners of his eyes. Things that aren’t quite certain what they are; they are waiting for someone to tell them. In this place, he is prepared to see spherical doors and tetrahedral fires, crystal birds and hollow bears, but he is not expecting a man on a bicycle wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt.
The man rides past the boy, then stops, gets off his bike, and walks back to him. The man is neatly bearded, the sides of his head trimmed short, his eyes hidden behind Wayfarer sunglasses. In another era, he might be on his way to work at a trendy software company. In this era, he is sweaty and dirty and the barrel of an Uzi pokes out of his messenger bag.
The boy keeps his eyes on his own toes as the man approaches him.
“Are you Living?” the man says, stopping a safe distance away.
The boy shrugs.
“I guess that’s a yes. You alone?”
The boy nods.
The man examines him. The boy’s skin is pale, but only as pale as dark skin can be. “Do you talk?”
The boy keeps his head down. He doesn’t talk. He can, but he doesn’t. To talk is to let people inside, to share common ground and common language. Even if the words are hateful, talking is a connection, and it requires a tiny amount of trust. More than the boy has.
And yet the boy is lonely. And hungry. He looks up at the man.
“Jesus!” the man says, jumping back and reaching instinctively for his gun, then stopping himself. He looks closer at the boy’s eyes. Bright, shimmering yellow. Two golden rings. “Those aren’t Dead eyes,” he says. “What kind of eyes are those?”
The boy shrugs.
The man looks at the boy. He looks him up and down. “What’s your name?”
The boy shrugs.
The man thinks for a moment. “Why don’t you come with me.”
The boy studies the man’s face, searching for something to read. The man’s sunglasses are a wall over his soul.
Is he a good person? the boy asks us. Is most of him in you?
We don’t answer.
The boy reaches out and takes the man’s hand. The man smiles.
There is no room for the boy on the bike so the man walks with it beside him. The boy notes that this is kind. It will slow the man down and double the length of his journey, but he does it. The Dead feed their young so that their young can help them feed. There is no feeling, no bond, only numbers multiplying themselves. It has been a long time since the boy has encountered kindness.
The boy and the man walk in silence. The man glances at the boy from time to time. The boy can feel his gaze even through the sunglasses, a faint heat on the side of his face.
They emerge from the forest into a small highway town, houses sagging, grass on roofs, tree branches poking through windows. The sun is melting against the edge of the horizon, about to disappear.