“Are you okay?” the man asks him. “Where are your parents?”
The boy looks at the man through the shadowy gloom of his sunglasses. The man’s eyes are round with surprise and concern. His face is thin and brown with a short beard of fuzzy tufts. He is waiting for an answer.
The boy shrugs.
“Are you alone, mate?” another man asks, and the boy looks at the van. A rusty old Volkswagen camper, crammed full of bags and boxes, food and guns. The man’s head pokes out of the passenger window. This one’s face is pale, his hair yellow and shaggy, his eyes big and green. The boy wants to take off these smothering sunglasses to get a better view of these eyes, but he leaves them on. Even in his otherworldly state, he is capable of learning. It’s what he’s here to do.
The green-eyed man steps out of the van and kneels down next to the brown-eyed man. His arms are tattooed with spirals of numbers. He reaches out and touches the boy’s face. The boy feels the instinct surge into his jaw, electrifying his teeth with unnatural hardness, but he forces it back down.
“You’re so cold,” the green-eyed man says. “Are you sick?”
“Cold?” the brown-eyed man says warily.
“Not that cold, Geb.”
“Can I take these off for a second?” the brown-eyed man says, reaching for the sunglasses.
The boy steps back and shakes his head violently.
“Okay, okay,” the man says, holding his hands up. “You need to look cool, I get it.”
The green-eyed man smiles. His eyes are gentle. “What’s your name, mate?”
The boy shrugs.
“Do you want to come with us?”
The boy thinks. His mind starts to form questions for us, specific and insistent, but he drops them. Instead, he reaches into the Library. He closes his eyes and skims our countless pages, a brief but vast fluttering. He gains something. An obscure insight. A word within an infinite crossword. He nods to the green-eyed man.
“My name’s Gael,” the man says. The boy notices a lilt in his voice, an echo of distant places. “This is Gebre.”
“Maybe we’ll talk later,” Gebre says. “When you’re ready.” His accent is exotic too, yet familiar. “For now, would you like a snack? You hungry?”
The boy shakes his head.
“Thirsty?” He pulls a water bottle from the back of the truck and offers it to the boy. The boy takes it. He stares at the liquid sloshing inside it, and then at the microorganisms sloshing inside the liquid, billions of little diamonds and helixes living unfathomable lives in an unknowable world. He takes a sip and feels them slide down his dry throat, becoming part of him. He climbs into the van with Gael and Gebre.
I
PAUL.
I am sitting on the roof with my friend Paul Bark, smoking a cigarette that I stole from my father. I don’t enjoy it; I can feel it burning my insides, but that’s the point. When I asked my father why he keeps a habit that will kill him, he took a deep drag and breathed out a scripture:
“?‘He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’?”
I didn’t understand then, but I do now. I suck in a lungful and resist the urge to cough until it fades to a dull ache. It feels good to hate my life. It feels safe. If death is what I want, then nothing can ever hurt me.
“What’s your mom doing?” Paul says.
In the lawn below, my mother is pruning a rosebush. Its blooms are impossibly red against their dull green stems, like puddles of pure hue leaking in from some other realm. There are flowers all over the yard despite the blistering heat. She hauls in a whole extra water cart every week just for them.
“Why does she waste all that effort on a stupid garden?” Paul says. “Doesn’t she believe in the Last Sunset?” He sounds angry, like he always does at the thought of unbelief, and I remember a game we once played when we were younger, pretending our bikes were dragons and his house was a castle we had to conquer.
“Tear down the walls of Jericho!” he had shouted gleefully as we circled the little cabin. “The Lord ordains their destruction!”
My bike slipped in the gravel and I crashed. “Piece of crap bike,” I said, kicking the tire.
Paul looked betrayed. “It’s not a bike, it’s a dragon! The Canaanites killed your dragon!”
“I cut my knee. I’m going inside.”
“No! You can’t!” There had been anger in his voice but also panic. “You’re ruining it!”
Now he glares at my mother’s rosebushes like they’re ruining a much bigger game. They trouble me too, because my mother does believe. She believes as strongly as anyone. And yet she plants flowers. She feeds refugees. Some deep, instinctive spring bubbles through the bedrock of her beliefs, and she does these senseless things.
“She’s a woman,” I tell my friend. “She likes flowers. She’s not thinking about what it means.”
Paul frowns. “?‘Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.’?”