The boy’s arm darts out, startling Gael into silence. His finger is pointing to something on the road ahead. The merriment drains from Gael’s face.
“Bloody hell,” he whispers.
The boy watches him expectantly. Gael assumes he is too innocent to have understood what he saw and is just eager to hear his road name. Gael doesn’t know him like we do. The boy knows exactly what he saw; he’s just waiting to see how this man responds to the daily horror of reality. Will he firm his face and wade straight in? Or will he cough uncomfortably and suggest a new game?
“Well . . . ,” Gael says in a trembling breath as the large, meaty pancake recedes behind them. “Car plus cartoon character . . . I guess your name is Rover Fudd.”
Gebre buries his face in his hands, shaking his head slowly.
For the first time in the boy’s second life—seven years of violence and torpor in endless, numbing repetitions—the boy smiles. He thinks goodness must be more than just kindness. It must have a hard frame to hold it together. How can you stitch a wound if you faint at the sight of blood? How can you do good in a world you refuse to see? Perhaps goodness requires honesty, which requires courage, which requires strength, which requires . . .
He stops himself.
Perhaps goodness is complicated.
The road ahead disappears from view, plunging down into a darker, denser woodland, and the boy hears the roar of an engine struggling up the hill. Gael stops the van, assuming that the strangers will want to share news and field notes and maybe some coffee or booze, as is the custom on these lonely highways. But as the boy stares at the road’s vanishing point, an abrupt terminus like the edge of a cliff, he hears another noise approaching from below. Not an engine.
He straightens up on his bucket. He tugs on Gael’s sleeve.
“What’s wrong, Rover?” Gael says.
The boy’s eyes implore him through his sunglasses as the noise grows louder, but Gael and Gebre just watch him with curious smiles, deaf to what’s coming.
“Go,” the boy croaks through his long disused larynx.
Gael and Gebre stare at him in open-mouthed amazement.
“Hide,” the boy says.
“Rover!” Gael says. “You’re talking!”
And you’re not listening.
The noise is growing louder, cutting through the roar of the engine like a serrated blade.
The boy suddenly remembers there are chunks of plastic covering his face. Big slabs of black polycarbonate between him and everything else, stopping light from coming in and emotion from going out, walling him off from the world. No wonder they don’t understand.
He pulls the glasses off and drops them. He looks from Gael to Gebre with his bare yellow eyes.
“Get off the road,” he says.
They stare in silence for several seconds. Then without looking away from the boy’s eyes, perhaps unaware he’s doing it, Gael turns the wheel and eases the van onto the shoulder. The boy is wondering how to explain that this isn’t far enough, that they have to crash into the woods and run as far away as possible, when the approaching vehicle crests the hill.
It’s a boxy armored bank truck. It’s painted all white. It’s hauling a long cargo trailer reinforced with steel plates. And the trailer is humming.
There are many things to which we could compare this sound—dissonant choirs, furious wasps, the om of a dark meditation—but the boy thinks of a bomb. He thinks of the death spirits that live inside a bomb, the essences of its chemicals hissing and howling behind the bomb’s steel walls, demanding to be released on the world.
And then they’re gone. The armored car and its horrible cargo disappear into the forest, and the van is once again alone on a silent road.
Gael and Gebre seem completely unaware of the nightmare that just rolled past them. They spare barely a glance for the rude travelers who didn’t even offer a friendly wave. They are staring at the boy, at his glimmering gold eyes. He senses questions coming, and they’re the wrong questions, and his brief moment of feeling understood evaporates. He gets off his bucket and retreats to the back of the van. He hides among piles of blankets.
The world makes little sense to the boy. It makes less the more he studies it. It contains creatures that are nothing more than algorithms, echoes of a dead society that deserved to die, and someone is putting them to use. Someone is gathering them together, believing someone somehow will benefit.
Perhaps goodness is not complicated. Perhaps it’s imaginary. Or perhaps it’s just drowned in madness.
As Gael and Gebre pull back onto the road and continue their journey east, as the boy sulks in the shadows and contemplates questions too big for his age, he hears another drone. This one is soft and almost soothing. A long, slow sigh from somewhere above him. He pokes his head out the window and looks up, but the sky is empty. The plane has already passed.
I
THE RAIN.