“In the dream, my father is inside an upright coffin in my living room. The coffin lid opens like a door and he walks out, though he’s dead. His skin is rotten, falling off — it’s gray, like ash, but all his internal organs are bright colors, red and pink and bluish. His jaw is barely hanging from his head. He’s reaching for me.” She put her hand at her own neck again. She sees the dream in present tense, like it’s in the room with them. Her father. Her throat constricts and the line of sweat between her legs goes cold, as if it were ice trickling down her inner thigh. “He’s trying to say something or do something. I want to kill him, but he’s already dead. I don’t know what… I had a brother. My brother was good. My father—”
“There’s a blast coming,” Mikael interrupted.
Shit. He could shut back up like a lockbox if I say anything. But he was baiting her now. She couldn’t ignore it. “A… blast?”
“A bomb.”
“When?”
“Soon,” Mikael said. “A van. In front of a government building. But I won’t say where.”
“Right. How do I know you’re not full of complete shit?”
Mikael studied Lilly. “You don’t. Women don’t seem to get what has happened. We’re all holding so many stories in here”—and he pounded his chest. “All of us. I could tell you one of a hundred different stories. I’m trying to decide which one to tell you. For instance, one story is, there are men out there who think their lives have been stolen from them. There are men who want to recruit boys like us”—he gestured in the air around his own body—“to do terrible things. All over the world. No one wants boys like us,” he said. “So the world eases us into the cracks, lights us up like dynamite.”
Lilly tried to make her jaw as strong and square as possible. “Well, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t give a shit.” Her words meant to hold steady like a bridge. “Are you trying to tell me you know something about a bomb?”
“When I was a boy, I had a baby,” he said.
Her heart lurched.
Mikael closed his eyes. Silence sat thick and hot between them. Without reopening his eyes, Mikael began to tell a story. “Once there was a boy,” he said into the air between them, like the words were trying to make a great journey.
“This boy lost his place in the world.” Mikael’s eyes were closed, as if closing his eyes could shut out the present tense, as if he could step back in time all the way through to childhood with the eyes of a keen observer. Or a loving parent who had suffered a great loss. The story of his boyhood spilling out of him in waves, the opposite of silence.
—
“Once there was a boy who slipped from his story, but he carried secrets with him, whether or not there was a place for him in the world.
“This boy was different from everyone and everything around him. The world looked strange to him, through his glasses — which were always smudged — and the way he reacted to things didn’t make the normal kind of sense. For instance, he trusted mycelia, the tiny threads that give birth to fungus, more than he trusted people. The thing about mycelia was, they stick together. They’re like a colony, a close-knit mass of branches. They live in ecosystems on the land and in the water; they absorb nutrients and break them down. They’re as important to decomposition as they are to life, which is a carbon cycle.
“Whereas the thing about people was, they’re mostly individual meat sacks that own and devour everything in their path, and you never know when their insides will come out.
“One time, in his neighborhood, the boy saw a large woman get shot in the face, by a seemingly kind-eyed boy, as she was boarding the bus. Her mind never made it onto the bus with her. Blood splashed on the windows. People screamed. The driver made everyone get off the bus. Police got hold of the gun-boy, and as they took him away, he saw in the gun-boy’s eyes that he’d been holding something that boys sometimes lose: the people they should have belonged to. That gun-boy looked right at him. He must have been from someplace else, like him, who knows where. Later, he heard that the gun-boy got sent away to something called a juvenile correction facility. Like a foster home, he thought.
“Finally, after the gun-boy was led away, another bus came and the kids were all taken home. When the boy got to his stop, he pushed his glasses up tighter to his eyes, felt the security of the thick black plastic above his ears. He stood and made his way to the front of the bus, passing various people along the way, though he didn’t dare make eye contact with any of them, because who knew what might happen.
“He was worried that he wouldn’t be able to ride the bus after that, but that would mean he’d have to walk, and his knees and shins already hurt from how far he had to walk just to get to the bus every day. The bus — no matter what risks sat inside — was still his best option. And the streets were dangerous. That was just true. You can’t help where foster fathers bring you. America, the gun.
“The bus always smelled like worn rubber floor liners and too many feet, and he couldn’t wait to get off, but even just stepping off the bus felt like a test to him. He kept his hands jammed into his pockets as he waited to get off, feeling the seams and bits of lint and the beginning of a hole at the bottom. He pushed his fingers through it till they reached the flesh of his thigh. He could feel his skin, his leg hair, which was barely there yet. His backpack felt heavier than it should. He wondered if he looked like a human turtle. He stared straight down, doing this thing where he made himself go a little deaf until danger had passed. Up front, the bus smelled like underarms and pee and tires. For a minute, he thought he might barf, but then the sound of the bus door opening and the rush of cold air woke him up again. The bus driver was a guy he was actually fond of, but if the man said anything as the boy went down the stairs, he didn’t hear it.
“The boy’s cheeks flushed the instant the cold air hit him. It made his teeth ache. His eyes dried up like a forgotten ice cube kicked into a dusty corner. The tips of his ears pinched. He wished he had a hat. Weren’t boys supposed to be sent off to school with hats, with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, with a kiss goodbye? That’s what he saw on TV, anyway. He trudged along, watching the tops of his shoes, wondering why one was scuffed and the other wasn’t. He wondered what that said about him. Was there something weird about the way he walked? Was he doing something with his feet all day at school that he didn’t realize? Did he kick things and not remember? Did anyone else notice?
“Sometimes the boy wondered how long he’d have to drag through this boyhood before he got to something better. Sometimes he worried he wouldn’t make it to the other side. Sometimes he worried there was no other side, just some trick of height and weight and the sag of man-gut and the way men grew pouches where their cheeks used to be. And their noses and ears. Men’s noses never stop growing, he thought, or maybe he heard it at school, or saw it on a screen somewhere. He pictured a man with a nose like a moose’s, tipping over, unable to stand, falling on his face.
“His walk home changed every day. He took the same path, which helped him recognize his way, but what happened was never the same, which confused him if he wasn’t careful. If he took a left but it turned out to be a right, someone might run a red light and hit the side of an old Buick hard enough to push it up onto the curb. Crowds could form out of nowhere. Cops. Dogs. Pigeons. One little change could have epic effects. Once, a man came running out of the mini-mart with armfuls of beer, and two bottles slipped from the man’s grasp and shattered, splashing onto the sidewalk. The owner came rushing out with an actual rifle, yelling and yelling in some language the boy didn’t know, or a language he did know that sounded different when yelled, until the thief got down on the ground and started begging or something — it looked vaguely like praying, or what the boy imagined praying might be. (Beer he knew about. Rifles and praying were from TV and movies and the nightly news.) The thief went down on the ground under the rifle and yelling, his cheek against the concrete beer everywhere. The boy saw the thief lick the concrete and cry.