tell you something?” he said.
“Sure.”
“It’s not a good thing,” Thaddeus said, “but I feel I need to tell somebody. And I think you’re the person to say it to.”
“Why me?”
Thaddeus shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the white suit.”
“It’s not as white as it was when I put it on,” I said.
“No matter,” Thaddeus said.
He scooted toward my blanket and leaned close, so he could whisper. “When I was a boy—I was—how old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“You’re fourteen?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were just a baby.”
“Maybe it’s the white suit,” I said.
Thaddeus nodded. “When I was nine years old, my mother became very sick with cancer. She was dying. It was terribly slow and ugly to witness. My father never talked to me about it. Not one time did he ask me how I was feeling, or what I was thinking about. Do you know?”
“I think so.”
“I was so angry about everything, but my father never spoke to me about it.”
“It must have been sad. I don’t have any parents, and now my aunt and my uncle—”
“Yes. Maybe that’s why I need to say this.” Thaddeus leaned toward my shoulder. His breath was hot as he whispered. “We had a small dog then. His name was Pipo.”
“That’s a good name.”
“I was so mad about everything. Outside our house, there were fields of wheat growing. One morning, I took Pipo into the field and dug a deep hole. Then I put the little dog in the hole and I buried him. Nobody knew what I did. That evening my father asked where the little dog was, and I lied to him and told him I didn’t know; that maybe he ran away. It was a terrible thing. I feel so bad about what I did. I think about it every day.”
I could see Thaddeus was crying.
“I never told anyone about it until now. I was a monster, but I couldn’t control myself.”
“Maybe that little dog was the only thing you could control.”
“I hate myself still.”
What could I say to the man? It was almost as though, in the telling, he were pouring the story of the little dog into me—this receiving vessel dressed in a clown suit—and now it would be my responsibility to carry Thaddeus’s story along with me for how many more years.
“Eventually, I suppose you’ll have to find a way to make things right,” I said.
“That’s why I’m telling you. You need to say how I can do this.”
“Why me?”
“Because, when I found you, it was as though you’d come out of a hole,” Thaddeus explained.
I shrugged.
“It was a refrigerator. I needed to pee.”
- - -
Jake Burgess worked in a semiautonomous laboratory owned by the Merrie-Seymour Research Group. It was called Alex Division. This is where nearly everything Jake Burgess invented came from, including our pet, Alex.
Jake always had a fascination with crows. He told me it was due to the birds’ uncanny intelligence and their ability to adapt to just about any situation that confronted them. The first Alex crow was a gift from Jake to Natalie just after the birth of Max, my American brother, who did not like me and was exactly sixteen days older than I was.
I say “first” Alex because that bird died when Max was ten months old and I lived in a dirty village halfway around the world from Sunday, West Virginia. Well, to be honest, the crow only sort of died when Max and I were ten months old.
Jake Burgess brought both of the Alex crows back to life. They were like photocopied beings that would never change, and never leave. Alex, our crow, was a member of a species that had been extinct for a century.
At that time, my father, Jake Burgess, was investigating a method for perfecting de-extinction for Alex Division. Of course, both the word and the concept of de-extinction are entirely ridiculous.
Extinction can’t be undone, or else you were never extinct in the first place. You were just waiting for something better than eternal death.
There was always something a little off about the things Jake Burgess brought back to life. At least, that’s what Max told me. I couldn’t exactly say I knew any of the other Alex animals created by Jake Burgess, so I had nothing to compare our pet to. Still, our resurrected pet bird did strike me as being empty of any kind of soul, and overwhelmingly disappointed by his existence.
Sometimes I wondered if Max had been emptied out and brought back to Sunday just like Alex, in some cruel experiment researched by his father, or that perhaps I had been brought back like our crow, too.
It’s funny how I remember some events in my life so clearly, and others—often recent ones—seem disjointed and fuzzy. I attribute that to nervousness, I suppose. It’s a very frightening thing, when you think about it, being dug up from a hole or extracted from a refrigerator and then finding yourself some kind of display artifact for everyone to marvel over (See the kid who shouldn’t actually be here!). But I can’t clearly remember all the details surrounding my arrival at the Burgess home in Sunday. I remember riding in a van with Jake Burgess and a man named Major Knott from a place called Annapolis, which I had never heard of before. Also, I remember all the trees and water—we crossed so many rivers on the way—things I’d only seen in pictures.
The Burgess house was a single-story brick home built into a hill with a garage and basement underneath the main floor. We walked up a gravel driveway to the front door, where Natalie and Max—who had taken the day off from school to meet his new foreign brother—waited.
Natalie held my face and kissed me on top of my head. It made me feel nice.
And Max said to me, “What’s your name, kid?”
“Uh.”
Natalie patted Max’s shoulder. “Don’t be silly, Max. We’ve told you. His name is Ariel.”
Max said, “Oh yeah. Ariel,” and walked away.
But they pronounced it correctly.
I went inside with Jake Burgess and Major Knott, who carried a cloth bag containing the new clothes and things they’d given me when I got to Annapolis. The house was dark and smelled like nothing I had ever smelled before. It was the smell of America, I’d supposed, a combination of furniture polish, cleanser, and cooking oil.
In the living room, behind an old tufted
