The mother carried the egg out through the front door down the street past other houses. She searched for a sewer, but could not find one, no other holes into the earth. The mother ran, her sternum shaking. She became afraid others could hear what the egg said. She went back and got in the car and sat the egg on the seat beside her. The egg’s voice super-boomed now, shaking the fake upholstery and the dash.
The mother drove the egg out to the coast. It was a sixteen-hour drive. The mother had never seen an ocean. The waves were flat and spackled, thick with old foam and floating geese. The mother lugged the egg into her arms. It seemed to weigh several times what it had, still growing. Halfway down and squeaming the mother had to stop and roll the egg in sand, its voice susurrating all the way out to the ruined dock.
At the smeared lip of the water — gassed and pudgy, melon yellow — the mother heaved the egg as hard as she could manage. It landed three feet from her feet. It fell in through the seahead spurting, as if in grease. Beneath the lip, it seemed to spin a minute, steaming. The mother watched the egg go down. There was a stutter on the surface. Overhead a troop of gulls quickly gathered fast — hundreds of them, enough to clot the sky. They dove in shifts at the egg’s indention. Their beaks were long and weird and curvy. Their eyes spun in hungry loops. As they came up, they lunged for the mother, squawking. The mother did not flinch. The mother watched for quite some time to make sure nothing could be done. In the house somewhere far behind her were the father and the son.
WHAT THE SON DID WITH HIS INFORMATION
The son was in the kitchen when the mother came back in. The mother had grass clippings all clung to her body, stuck in the glisten of her sweat. She left a trail behind her on the carpet. She had it in her teeth too, where she’d licked the clippings, where several gulls had nipped her neck. She looked slightly like another person. She weighed nine pounds lighter than that morning.
The son had emptied the refrigerator. On the kitchen floor he’d spread the milk, juice, eggs, several cheeses, tortillas, bacon, cold cuts, margarine and butter, ketchup, lettuce — all the other things the mother had just bought. Everything had already either wilted or gone sour. Some had grown a slight rind of mold. The son had also cleared the freezer. He’d dumped the popsicles, waffles, yogurt, ice cream, ice in massive slushing piles. The veal cordon bleu and veggie medleys and tiny cheesecakes in countless stay-fresh packets, an off-brand box of frozen dinners bought in bulk some evening for the son at his request. The melting had made a puddle that spread across most of the kitchen floor and turned the edge of the carpet leading into the dining room several shades of color deep.
The son had taken out the plastic and glass shelving and the drawers that held the food. The fridge was now one large empty box with two tiny light bulbs gummed with glow. The son was standing in the freezer part of the refrigerator. His shoulders fit the width precisely. The back wall seemed to stretch so deep. Just as the mother came into the room, the son moved his hand and closed the door. Their eyes met briefly in transition, like electric light. A shutter shut. The room was still.
Later the mother would wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t come in at that exact moment. She would consider it a sign from god. She would seal the fridge with tape and bring another smaller fridge to sit in the parents’ bedroom so that the son would not feel the urge to repeat. She would not think about how the son could just go climb into the freezer in the garage, or in the magic trunk stored in the attic, or how everywhere there were roads and overpasses, and cars driving under, piloted by whomever.
The mother went to the freezer and pulled it open and saw the son. The son looked tired, the same way everyone else she’d seen looked tired. Everyone everywhere at every moment as tired as they could be. The mother asked the son what he was doing. Her voice came out much higher than it did most days. The son said something wadded. The son had something in his mouth. The mother asked him to repeat. It came out more off. The son was trying to talk in the same voice as the voice that had called him on his cell phone, but the mother couldn’t know that. The son had abrasions grown in beneath his hair that the mother would never find.
The mother did see, though, how the son now had long brown streaks worked under his eyes — so brown they looked like makeup. She rubbed one with her thumb and made a smudge. The son looked like a tiny warrior, or a linebacker. The son’s eyes were whirling, as had the gulls.
Hey, the son said, staring at her. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.
The mother clasped her grass-green hands.
THE MOST FREQUENTLY PLAYED SONG ON THE SON’S COMPUTER BEFORE THE SON ERASED THE CONTENTS OF THE HARD DRIVE AND BURNED IT AND BURIED THE COMPUTER IN THE WOODS
1. _________ (197136 plays). This song’s title appeared in the son’s iTunes browser as a trail of mangled digits or a blur. The son could not view the details of the track. When the son tried to click the track to play it, iTunes would crash and often so would the computer. He did not know how the song had gotten onto his machine. Sometimes the son was able to mouseover the title when rolling in from certain angles and the album art would appear in the bottom corner of the iTunes browser. The album’s artwork appeared to be the face of a man obscured by several kinds of light, though the son could never see the image long enough to be certain of the features, or the flesh. The song’s play count rose week after week, despite the son never hearing, and continued when the son turned the computer asleep or off. In this way this song covered the son’s whole life, up to a point. Sometimes unplugged, the computer’s encasement would discolor or spin or flake or walk. The son could not bring himself to delete this song.
INCOMING
The next time the father went to get the mail he found the whole box fat with caterpillars. They spilled out as he pulled the lid down. They were curled and brightly hued, some in a webbing. Some had hair as long as half a foot and fat as someone’s finger. Some wore yellow and some wore orange, some wore gold or green and black or silver, messed in spindles, mounds. Some were a color the father could not think of the name of, though somehow it reminded him of a stretch of land for sale somewhere in Nebraska. The father had never been to Nebraska. The critters fell and wiggled on the concrete. There were hundreds of them stuffed inside the mailbox. There was no room for the mail.
The father went to the garage and got a cup and bucket and went back and used the cup to scoop the caterpillars out. He didn’t want to touch them with his fingers — he didn’t like that. Crawling. He didn’t want to kill them either. The father had heard stories of men becoming things in other lives — how when you are reborn you could come as any other. You could come back as a wall. The father imagined his father there in the mailbox now, spackled, wet with wriggling, and his father’s father, and father’s father’s father, on from there. The father imagined all the prior men in his dead family there in the mailbox waiting for him, destined. This was some kind of delivery.
In careful scoops the father took the caterpillars from the mailbox and when he’d filled the bucket up he carried them away. He went off behind the house and through the forest following a wire until he got to some small exact place, in the mud. He dumped the bucket in a pile of colored moss or mold that’d grown up in this location, groggy bloom. The caterpillars (fathers) squirmed and squirted. Many slunk or screamed along the ground. Some submerged headfirst down into the dirt, building tunnels, which the father had never seen a caterpillar do, down and down into the earth. Then silence.