“We’ll sleep here,” the man says, glancing at the boy again. They leave the crumbled highway and enter the crumbled town.
Next to the gas station, there is a tiny play area. One swing set and a jungle gym, its colorful paint all peeled off, a spidery dome of rusted steel bars. The man pries an armful of shingles off the side of the gas station and carries it back to the jungle gym, dumps it through the holes, and climbs inside.
“Safest place to have a fire,” he says, smiling at the boy. “No surprises in here.”
The boy crawls into the dome and sits in the weedy grass that’s growing through the sand. He watches the man coax the rotted shingles into a tiny, sad fire that’s mostly smoke. When he’s convinced that it won’t burn any better, the man sits back and finally takes off his sunglasses. He looks at the boy. The boy tries to read his eyes but their piercing focus makes him look away.
“Sorry for staring,” the man says, still staring. “I’ve never seen eyes like yours.”
The boy reaches into the man’s messenger bag. Underneath the gun and a big knife, there is a stick of beef jerky. He pulls it out and regards it warily. He has tried this before, but maybe now . . .
“Go ahead,” the man says. “If you’re hungry, go ahead.”
The boy takes a bite. He chews the cured, salted, chemically preserved meat. No trace of life energy, human or otherwise. He spits the meat into the gravel.
The man nods. “Thought so.”
The boy looks up, not understanding this comment.
“I’ve heard about ones like you. Mostly Dead? Sort of . . . stuck in between?”
The boy lowers his eyes to the fire.
The man rises to a crouch and hobbles around the smoldering pile of shingles, keeping his head down but still bumping a few of the jungle gym bars. He sits next to the boy. “It must be confusing. Your brain trying to tell you you’re a person even though there’s nothing in there. Just a bunch of impulses in an empty room.” He looks at the side of the boy’s cheek. “I feel like that sometimes.”
The boy looks into the fire while the man looks at his cheek, his neck. The fire’s core is a murky red glow behind all the smoke.
“But you know, you don’t need to worry about that,” the man says, his voice soft and deeply earnest. “Because you’re not really alive. Just try to remember that, okay? Everything is easier if you remember that.”
The boy turns to look at the man. The man smiles and puts one hand on the boy’s thigh. Then the other on his zipper.
The boy bites off the man’s ear.
The man screams and leaps to his feet. His head hits the bars with a ping and he falls face-first into the fire. He lies motionless while his beard burns like dry moss. The boy hikes up the man’s T-shirt and chews into the wells of life pulsing through deltoids, trapezius, latissimus, fascia.
How will you file this? he asks us as he buries his face in bloody flesh. This moment, me and this bad person, this thing I had to do. Higher or Lower? Will people read it and learn from it, or will you lock it away?
We want to tell the boy he doesn’t understand. We are not a librarian; we are the books. But even if we broke our silence now, he wouldn’t listen. He is busy.
He peels the man layer by layer, siphoning the life into his own starved cells. He has fought the hunger for a very long time, trying to hold his precarious balance, but there are limits. He can feel the cure circling in his head, tickling his eyes, showing him secret truths while it knocks on his soul, but he keeps the door barred. He is angry. He is not ready to talk.
He eats until he’s full and then sits in the sand, staring at the red mess. Most of the man is gone, but the sinews that remain begin to twitch. The boy didn’t touch the brain. This man’s brain is toxic waste bubbling in the barrel of his skull, and it must be disposed of. The boy pulls the knife out of the messenger bag and removes the head from its neck. The eyes blink open, now gray. They watch him as he digs a hole in the sand. They watch him as he drops the head into the hole, and they continue to watch until he scoops sand over them. A little mound remains, so he builds a little castle, then he crawls out of the jungle gym.
He doesn’t take the knife, or the gun, or the bike. His objective is not survival or advancement. He is simply searching. But he does take the sunglasses. He puts them on, covering the gleaming evidence of the struggle inside him. He walks back to the highway while the man he hoped was good smolders in the fire, tendrils of greasy smoke rising toward the stars.
I