them as easily as putting your foot in a shoe. And some shoes are best for running. Because of the way your foot lands. When you run, you’re all the way up in the air for a second, so you need more support for when you come back down. When you walk, you just put one foot in front of the other. There’s less pressure when you walk, so those soles are made differently. You shouldn’t really use walking shoes to run, but I guess you could do the opposite and it wouldn’t hurt much."
"So what you’re saying is, my shoes are good for nothing?"
"I guess so. Especially now." They both looked at the deformed shoe and laughed. Harvey felt better than he had in years. Perhaps he had found his way in. "There’s this pair of shoes your mom had—I wonder if they’re still in her closet. Anyway, they were made for her, just perfect for her walking gait. They had this beautiful curved breast, which is the front part of the heel—"
"Why do you know so much about shoes?" Kendrick said. He leaned over and took a pocketknife from his bedside table.
"I just do," Harvey said, watching him, curious.
"You know nothing about me but everything about shoes. Even her shoes. It’s weird."
Harvey’s heart fell. Only hours out of The Gate, and he’d already broken his promise not to talk about the boy’s mother. He watched Kendrick stab the shoe’s outsole and start cutting off a new piece to throw on the floor.
"I know that when I was taken away, she had twenty-seven pairs of high heels, six pairs of tennis shoes, ten pairs of sandals, and two pairs of boots, and I loved her. I know that when you were little, you liked to walk around without shoes like an Amish kid with feet as tough as steel. And I loved you, too."
"All you know is shoes."
"Maybe. But there’s a lot of good stuff to know about shoes. I can fix that one, for example. Go ahead. Cut the hole damn sole off, and I can fix it. Sorry, I said damn."
Kendrick put down the knife and smiled.
"I’m fourteen," he said. "I’ve heard it. I’ve said it."
"Good. Well, not good, obviously—you shouldn’t say that." He started to give Kendrick a stern finger in the face but thought better of it. "Anyway, just put some rubber and a skiver and some glue in front of me, maybe a needle and thread with some material to create a new welt, and I can fix any sole. I can make it better than ever, in fact. Your gait will thank me."
Kendrick put down the shoe.
"It’s just a shoe, though," he said. "What about the other stuff? You were gone…"
Harvey nodded, frowning. "Nine years. I thought about you every day I was in The Gate."
"That’s really what it was called?"
"That’s what they called it."
Kendrick clicked his tongue a couple of times.
"I bet you didn’t think about me every day," he said. "You couldn’t have. That’s a lot of days."
"Every day. In my head, you even had a pair of shoes for every day and every gait in your cycle. I could list them."
Kendrick thought for a moment. He put his hands on his knees and rubbed them up and down. Then he stopped moving, his hands resting on his lap. "What were you in for?"
"Theft," Harvey said. "Of shoes."
Kendrick laughed for several seconds, probably longer than he meant to. But he didn’t ask for the truth.
Harvey reached out and put his hand on his son’s shoulder. This time, Kendrick let him. Harvey smiled. Life on the outside was far from perfect, but he was home again, and he was a father again. It was a gait he could get used to.
Home on the Moon
The year 1972 is coming to a close, which means rain and darkness all the time in Vietnam, and you’re stationed next to the river. So it rains, and you’re up to your knees in the black, slimy floodwaters of the Song Tra Bong. The dead boy lies there along the banks. He floats in the vast overflow like something being carried away by ants. His eyes are open, pelted with never-ending drops from the sky. You wonder how he can keep them open like that, and then you remember: he’s dead. You remember how you had to shoot his ear off to stop him and how he had kept running toward you with his rifle and you had to shoot him in the forehead. Filthy, red-black blood oozes from the wound, dripping down into the slime.
And everything is putrid. You’re dressed like a tree—the better to stay hidden—and you smell like a toilet because everything does. It’s the Song Tra Bong.
But the worst part is how young he is. The boy you killed reminds you of your son, who you don’t even know anymore, who was six years old when you left him. The dead boy and your son are about twelve. You look at the body they seem to share now and see the last bit of innocence being swallowed up by war. A boy who hasn’t begun to shave yet, who’s probably never kissed a girl. A boy with dirt on his face, playing soldier like children do. Idolizing the protectors of his country.
The boy lies there in shadow, and all you can see is your son, who waits patiently on the porch swing at the edge of your mind. As if he just wants to talk. The moon shines through the clouds for the first time in weeks, illuminating the dead boy’s face, and you see it, and he really does look like he could be him: your son, who liked to build things, back when you knew him, and maybe still does. You wish you knew him now, what he really looks like. You wish he could build you and him and Calpurnia a home far away—perhaps on the moon itself, in a dusty oasis far from the cesspool of Vietnam—and you could get to know him again.
Most of all, you wish the moon wasn’t so powerful at night. In Vietnam, the dark is pitch-black, so any amount of moonlight is like a beam from the sun. In Vietnam, the moon is complicit in your actions because it shows them to you. The boy you had to kill is only about twelve. It’s all there in his lit-up face; you just have to look. So you do, and you wonder how this could happen so soon. He’s twelve. Why did no one ever talk him out of this? He lies there, sinking, being swallowed up in the valley of the Song Tra Bong. As the last of him disappears under the slime, you gaze into the face of your son—a future painter, maybe, or an architect, but a visionary in any case—and for just a few seconds, you are proud, and you are at home on the moon.
The Paper Man
We lived among the coconut trees near the shore, and since our meat supply had become so scarce lately, we looked to the coconut for sustenance. It was adequate; it was versatile. Raw, fire-grilled, toasted, roasted, blackened, charred—the taste we required could be controlled with a little forethought as to how long the coconut was on the fire. Still, the meat of it was really just fruit. We hadn’t seen a boar or even a squirrel in weeks, and our taste buds were eager for something more complex and wild. There was a fear in our group that we might never have real meat again. Then the man came.
It was Areka who spotted him first and recognized him for what he was. The distinct masculine curve of his jaw, the broadness of his shoulders, the long, distinguished black beard: this creature was indeed a man. And we would know. All our lives, we’d gathered around campfires late at night to hear descriptions of men from the women old enough to remember them. But there was something in the man’s appearance that was surprising even to the elder ladies. Where the man should have worn layers of mud, like us, to shield himself from the sun while allowing movement, he wore a light papery substance instead. It covered up his manly form and, no doubt, made it difficult to move, for fear of tearing.
Near a large oak tree, he set about gathering acorns one at a time with his nose, inching them forward, rolling them into three equal piles. He was careful not to tear the paper as he crawled. He worked slowly. We could see that the man was primitive.
As we watched him work, we slathered new layers of mud on our bare breasts, rubbing outward from the nipple, and then eventually covered our shoulders and faces. When we were dressed, we took up our bows and charged forth.
At the oak, we surrounded him. He froze. His eyes shifted from breast to breast, opened up wide, as if he’d never seen a woman before. We, too, hesitated for a moment, drinking in the sight of a man who, for all we knew, was
made mostly of paper. We threw aside our bows and moved close enough to touch him. He blinked, and Areka grabbed hold.
When she tightened her grip on him, the brute cried out, and we heard a fear that went unrivaled in the annals of our history. There was a pathetic, raspy quality to the man’s voice, a cracking, as if he himself were about to break into a thousand useless scraps and fall down on us.
"Primitives," Areka said in disgust, and we all seized him.
With somewhat of a struggle, we dragged him away from the oak, drawing lines in the earth with his legs. He screamed until he was hoarse. Then he just cried.
Back at our camp, Areka restrained him while we stoked the fire and prepared the apparatus that would hold him in place above it. He would burn up nicely, with all that paper, and we were eager to eat him when he charred. His paper would turn to ash and float above us, raining into our hair as we enjoyed his body.
Meanwhile, Areka sat on his chest. She held his hands against the ground, and when he struggled, his paper suit began to tear. So he stopped moving; he stopped crying; he hardly even sniffled. Eventually, Areka let go of his hands, and we stopped to watch them.
Areka looked at his mouth, touched his lips, tidied his wild beard with her fingertips. He gave a slight smile. Then their eyes met, and she inched forward. He was gentle, still. Harmless.
"Sisters," she said, and she looked