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 chair, stood a type of black rounded perch. And on that perch was the Burgesses’ crow, Alex. He was staring at me, holding perfectly still. I honestly thought he was some sort of decoration; I never imagined people kept such creatures in their homes.
But then Alex moved his head slightly and said, “Punch the clown. Punch the clown.”
It was nothing more than a frightening coincidence. Eventually I came to realize Alex learned much of his vocabulary from Max.
- - -
Joseph Stalin was not the only voice inside Leonard Fountain’s melting head. The melting man also heard someone named 3-60.
3-60 was not as mean or harmful as Joseph Stalin. While Joseph Stalin urged Leonard Fountain to kill people, 3-60 said nice things to the melting man. 3-60 liked to narrate to Leonard Fountain everything that he was doing, as though she were telling the story of the melting man’s life while it played out in real time.
“You are turning onto Smale Road.”
“Yes. I am,” the melting man said to 3-60.
“You are driving past a cemetery. You are looking at the headstones. Your balls are itchy. You are drifting off the road.”
The melting man swerved back onto the highway.
“Thank you for saving my life, 3-60.”
“You’re welcome, Lenny.”
That reminded the melting man of his younger brother, who was the only person who’d ever called him Lenny.
“But your balls still itch,” 3-60 reminded him.
“Oh yeah.”
“Now they hurt.”
“Well, I shouldn’t have scratched them,” the melting man said.
“You’re very sick,” 3-60 told him. “Maybe you should consider leaving the masterpiece somewhere along the side of the road and just moving on.”
“I have to do what Joseph Stalin told me to do. I don’t want to make him angry.”
“You are driving. You are driving. You are driving,” 3-60 said.
“Yes. I am.”
Tuesday, February 17, 1880 — Alex Crow
While the Alex Crow sank, the crew managed to pull two of the ship’s longboats, as well as the dog sleds, food, and equipment from the doomed vessel.
Mr Warren could not assist the off-loading due to his incapacitation. However, in this past week, Mr Warren’s hand has healed significantly, although he has lost a great deal of mobility due to the shattered bones. Imagine the predicament of a newspaperman who lacks the ability to put pen to paper! Mr Warren has been dictating to Murdoch, but the man is constantly frustrated by Murdoch’s deficiencies in skill.
Let me express how disheartening it was to see the last timbers of the Alex Crow being shut up behind