He always remembered that smell, during the violence — the smell of pennies.
—
In Lilly’s first visits to the library, on her off hours, she studied the system her father had occupied: the posts, the assignments, the ranks. She learned what position her father had occupied in the order of things. She learned what power he’d had, the kinds of commands he’d issued. It was easy; he was not an obscure figure. What did you think, that the information would be hidden? She learned that her father had no superiors. She learned that he’d had one of his own right-hand men killed for refusing an order. She learned about another order he’d issued, to sever the arm of a photographer who had taken his photo.
Butcher’s Daughter.
Perhaps because she’d grown tired from trying to reinvent a life too many times; perhaps because she’d jettisoned what she’d known her entire life — that her father had recruited her brother first into abuse and then into barbarism, that he’d ordered her brother to execute a woman and child to prove that his loyalty could not be swayed by women and children — perhaps because she wished she were anyone else’s daughter, a child beater’s, a sodomizer’s, whatever; perhaps because of all this, she directed her life toward the purpose of saving boys from becoming monsters.
She devoted the rest of her life to these floating boys — those who drifted away from a story that might have nurtured them into security and health, whose lives were lived on the sharp edge between violence and beauty, who took the place of the word brother.
What she could not decide from her own track record — a tiny three percent liberated from the juvenile detention system and recirculated back into supposed regular lives, some of them former immigrants, or refugees, or just strays — was whether she was helping or hurting. Who takes the side of boys or men who behave brutally, anyway? Who should?
In the library, going over documents, peering at screens, launching searches, she opened a notebook and wrote down a single phrase.
daughter of a war criminal.
Then she tore the piece of paper from the notebook and ate it to stop herself from crying.
—
Those early days had been the hardest, when he’d taken a beating every single day, sometimes more than once a day, when he’d been made to eat dirt, or drink urine, or when they’d smeared shit on his face. He’d still been a boy then. A scared small weak soft boy. Repulsive.
There was no revelation, no equation, no scientific experiment that could change that. His boyhood obsessions? Nothing to open your mouth about here. Ever. So he hid his unstoppable brain deep down, at the bottom of some ocean inside his gut.
The hardest backhanded blow he’d taken as a boy happened when he’d collected every object in the false father’s apartment — every fork and spoon, every salt and pepper shaker, every toothbrush and squeezed-to-death toothpaste tube, every cracked china cup and plate, every ashtray, cigarette pack, chipped cheap cologne bottle, straight razor, soap nub, discarded toilet paper tube, coffee mug and thick shot glass, ring of keys, handful of rags, stray matchbook, and can after can of beans, peas, peaches, soup — and lined them all up in an elaborate maze on the moldy orange-brown carpet of the main room. The artifacts of the opposite of family.
—
When his father returned from work, the big heavy backhand came, knocking his jaw hard to the left, throwing his glasses off his face, blotching the side of his cheek red, his ears ringing for days. You have exactly ten minutes to clean this shit up. Exactly ten minutes to put every single thing back exactly where you found it or I’ll take you to the woods and leave you there forever. What a goddamn mess. You goddamn idiot.
But it hadn’t been a goddamn mess. It had been a habitat.
To preserve himself, he started to draw on the floor of his room with pencils, his hand pushing graphite into concrete until the pencils were ground to nubs. In his head, an entirely new world revealed itself, like a waking dream. The images were always the same: elaborate habitats of air, land, and sea strung together by bridges like webs between worlds. In the air, individual dwellings were shaped like giant hovering birds with large bellies and broad wings. On water, he drew modules that fanned out in the shapes of starfish or curled like conch shells in great spirals. Underwater, the structures he drew resembled the broad backs of turtles or the bellies of great whales. And every habitat was connected by bridges and elevators, extending up and down, side to side, in spiraling helixes.
Of course, no one who looked down at Mikael’s elaborate habitat dreams saw them as such. Of course, he was punished for his work every single day, made to clean the floors he had covered with his dreams. And every single night, he would reconstruct the drawings, their intricate architecture becoming more and more vivid each time. Finally, at the suggestion of a case worker, they took the pencils away and gave him pastel chalk. Chalk was much easier to clean up was the thinking. So he ate the chalk to spite them, and started breaking off pieces of his environment — chairs, bed springs, bathroom fixtures — so that he could scrape the drawings into the floor. This led to a change in rooms, to a room with a dark-blue industrial-grade carpet. The carpet smelled like petroleum. At night, the floor looked like the bottom of the ocean.
After that, by necessity, he continued his drawings in a more covert fashion, using his fingernails to create a perfect map of his world on the wall behind the tattered chest of drawers, drawing images from his mind’s eye with blood from his fingertips.
Years passed.
Caseworkers came and went.
The drawings grew more detailed, more intimate; it was as though the boy were engraving his DNA into the wall. Every night, he pulled up one corner of the carpet to expose the floor, made his drawings there, and then replaced it before sunup. He even considered scratching and inking them onto his chest.
With time, in his drawings, he seemed to be growing the bones and muscles of some other land. Maybe even his land of origin, he thought. He thought about Vera’s stories. He knew, from the occasional media access he had in the facility, that if he’d lived in the places she described as long as he’d lived here, he’d have earned the tattoos that indicate rank among young men who came of age in such violent, often war-torn wastelands. Which don’t exist like the stories anyone cared about, of course, in the same way the abuse or neglect of boys doesn’t exist.
One year, another boy his exact age came through the facility. The boy was almost old enough to be placed in adult detention, but he had landed here instead as a kind of last chance, since he’d never seriously injured any people, just property and himself. This boy liked to set off small improvised explosive devices. Mikael did not like him, though he did feel a kind of solidarity after hearing the boy’s stories of being bullied and hated as a child. The two of them were not alike. But when they walked across a field or down a hallway side by side, their shoulders looked similar, squared off with about-to-be-men rage, the cover story for brokenhearted boys. The other young man’s name was William. His hair was red. His great-grandfather had emigrated from Ireland. His parents divorced when he was ten, and he then had lived with his father, who was endlessly drunk and beat him severely.
William was only at the facility for a year, but in that year, two things happened: Mikael showed William his new habitat, drawing its outline in the dirt with a stick one day out in the yard. And William showed Mikael his prized possession, a letter he kept stuffed down the back of his pants. It was a kind of intimacy, to share one’s private objects that way.