drooping, piss-soaked underwear, and the rest of us, the four insomniacs with dry underwear, to go to the lavatory—a dark and scary combination toilet, insect sanctuary, and shower facility for the campers—and fetch a mop and pail.
On the way there, Cobie said, “If you weren’t covered in piss, kid, I’d kick the shit out of you.”
I wondered if Cobie Petersen really meant that, because if he actually did kick the shit out of Bucky Littlejohn, it would really be a mess we’d have to clean up.
It was a very long night.
It was hot and stuffy inside the walk-in refrigerator where I hid the day of the slaughter at the schoolhouse.
It may be difficult for you to believe, Max, but electricity only came to the village once or twice per week, so the refrigerator had never performed its duties as far as I could recall. Maybe it did function as something other than a clown’s hideout at some point in time. Maybe there were legends passed down from the elders of the village about an era when the refrigerator was cold, and also contained food.
Despite the fact that there was nothing edible inside the refrigerator, I could not bring myself to pee there when I needed to.
Nobody pees inside refrigerators, even ones with no food in them. I would be in trouble if anyone ever found out I’d peed inside our school’s refrigerator.
But, as desperate as my urge to pee was, I was too afraid to go outside.
I thought about things. I wondered who was safe in the village, and if my cousins, my uncle, and aunt had been looking for me—or if they assumed I’d gone off with the other boys to become a rebel with the FDJA.
So I tried to devise a mathematical formula based on the concept of predicting when, exactly, the need to pee would surpass my fear of being shot while dressed in a clown suit. As I thought about this, I curled up on my side and fell asleep on the floor.
It is possible that I was inside the refrigerator for days. Who could ever know? Refrigeration—even when the refrigerator in question does not produce coldness—has a way of slowing down time. But I do know this: The mathematical breaking point at which I overcame my fear of going outside occurred sometime before I opened my eyes.
I needed to go.
So picture this, it is a disturbing image: a fourteen-year-old boy wearing a white clown suit, peeing into the gutter along a street in a village where none of the residents is alive.
Everyone had disappeared or lay dead. Their bodies were scattered randomly as though they simply had the life force sucked away from them while they went about their daily drudgeries.
It was poison gas. We were familiar with such things. It had happened before and certainly would happen again.
A useless refrigerator saved my life.
A second miracle, or possibly just another accident. Who can say about things like this?
It was afternoon—but what day I could not tell—when I came out of the refrigerator to pee among the dead in the street in front of my old school. I say old because it certainly was not going to be a school after this. There was nobody left to learn anything.
“Hey there. Where did you come from?”
I spun around to see who’d asked the question. I hadn’t finished, so I found myself peeing in the direction of a pair of uniformed Republican Army soldiers carrying rifles. They’d been walking, searching house to house along the street toward the school. The men wore gas masks over their faces, so I could not tell which of them had called to me.
“I came from a refrigerator,” I said.
“How long have you been outside here?”
“Not even long enough to pee.”
They stood there, watching me as I buttoned up the front of my clown pants.
The soldier on the right turned to his partner and said, “It’s a miracle this little boy survived.”
“I thought so, too,” I said, choosing not to argue about such things as accidents and divinity.
“Why are you dressed like that?”
“We were having a play.” I nodded at the school. “In there. Someone stole my clothes and I had to stay like this. And why are you dressed like that ?”
I pointed up and down, at the men’s uniforms.
“You’re a funny clown.”
I shrugged. “I do my best.”
I turned as if to leave. “I need to go to my uncle’s house.”
“Where? In the village? Here?”
I nodded.
The soldier shook his head. “There’s nobody left, boy. Just you. You’re a damned lucky clown.”
“Pierrot.”
The man on the right pulled the mask from his face and wiped the back of a shirtsleeve across his eyes. “I suppose if you can breathe, we might take these damn things off now.”
“The kid’s a little canary,” the second soldier said.
“Was there any food inside your refrigerator?”
“No.”
“Are you hungry?”
I tried to read his face, but there was nothing there. Only whiskers and sweat. He looked as though he hadn’t shaved or slept in days. People commonly had that look in those days—in my first life, Max.
“Yes.”
“Maybe you should come with us. There’s nothing left here, anyway. You don’t want to stay here now, clown-boy.”
“My name is Ariel,” I said.
- - -
Jacob and Natalie Burgess—my American parents—drove me and Max—my American brother—all the way from Sunday, West Virginia, just so that I could see New York City.
They did it only two days after I arrived in the United States.
It is hard to explain the strangeness of my experience. In a matter of days, I had been taken from the filthy squalor of a refugee camp, and then escorted to America aboard a military aircraft by a man named Major Knott, to the Burgesses’ home in a sauerkraut-eating and rifle-admiring hamlet in West Virginia. And then I was whisked away in an automobile with a satellite navigation system for an eight-hour ride so I could gawk in awe at the towers to the sky of New York.
Alex, our crow, came, too. He stayed inside a small plastic crate—the kind you’d keep a dog in—stowed in
