When she said build walls, Mrs. Nussbaum pressed her flattened palms in the air in front of her face, as though she were acting out a street mime’s performance of “Man Trapped in an Invisible Box.”
And Robin said, “Huh?”
“He keeps shit in his ears, ma’am,” Cobie Petersen pointed out.
“Oh,” Mrs. Nussbaum said.
Then Mrs. Nussbaum asked us if we felt guilty or sad about what happened to Bucky Littlejohn that day on the archery field.
We all shook our heads, and Cobie said, “He pissed in his bed last night, and Larry made us all clean it up. He was bound to get shot sooner or later.”
Mrs. Nussbaum looked approvingly at Larry and told us, “You boys are off to a great start, I can tell! That’s a very nice way to build a team.”
I suppose team-building in America depends on getting someone else’s pee on your hands.
That day, Mrs. Nussbaum passed out blank index cards and gave us pencils. The pencils were the small kind you’d get inside box games, like Yahtzee. The Burgesses played Yahtzee every Saturday night. Max hated the game. He told me it was the only game he knew of where it was impossible to cheat, plus you had to do math. Both of these features made the whole thing not fun to Max.
The pencils Mrs. Nussbaum gave us had no erasers, which implied to me a prohibition on making mistakes. I noticed how Cobie Petersen rubbed the pad of his thumb on his pencil’s point. I was reasonably certain he was estimating things like sharpness and stabbing potential.
My pencil had teeth marks in it.
And Mrs. Nussbaum instructed: “I want each of you to write on your cards. I want you to write about where you would most rather be, if you couldn’t be here right now at Camp Merrie-Seymour with your friends.”
We all looked around at our cabin mates.
Friends?
“Come on, boys! You can do it!” Mrs. Nussbaum prodded, raising the pitch of her voice about one-half octave above “drunkenly enthusiastic,” and just below the sound baby dolphins make.
“Do we put our names on them?” Max asked.
“Oh, heavens no! These are only for you. They are personal.”
“Do we have to write in complete sentences?” Max said.
Mrs. Nussbaum frowned and shook her head.
When we finished (and I had no idea what any of the other boys wrote), Mrs. Nussbaum told us to fold our cards in half and tuck them under our pillows. Of course, when we did that, it sounded like a beer-can-crushing party. She told us we could revise our answers anytime we wanted to over the next six weeks, and that maybe we would all be able to see changes in ourselves by the time we had to go back home.
I didn’t get what Mrs. Nussbaum meant by revising our answers. No matter what I did for the next six weeks, if I unfolded my index card and looked at it again, it was still going to say the same thing. Who didn’t know that?
And Bucky Littlejohn saw plenty of change in himself in his less-than-twenty-four hours at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. He saw a hole through his left foot, and at that moment was undergoing surgery somewhere.
This is what I wrote on my index card:
INSIDE A REFRIGERATOR
It was not a very productive first group-therapy session, I think.
After Mrs. Nussbaum left, we all stood and attempted to make our way out of the cabin, but Larry stopped us. While Mrs. Nussbaum was relatively controllable as far as the manipulative and uncooperative puppies of Jupiter were concerned, Larry was another challenge altogether.
I’m pretty sure all of us were afraid of him.
“You’re not going anywhere, fuckheads.” He said, “Now sit down.”
So each of us sat at the foot of his bed, and faced across the cabin at Larry.
“Let’s get something straight right now,” he said. “I’m in charge of you guys for the next six weeks. You haven’t even been here one day, and already one of you dickwads almost died. If I lose my job because of shit like this, they’ll send me home and my dad will kick me out of the house, or make me get a real job and pay rent and shit.”
Cobie Petersen raised his hand, like a kid in a classroom.
Larry was clearly irritated. “What?”
Cobie said, “How old are you, Larry?”
Larry glared at Cobie. I realized then that Cobie Petersen was very good at testing people’s resilience.
“Twenty-two. Why?”
Cobie shrugged. “Just wondering. Maybe you should get a real job.”
Larry clenched his teeth and inhaled deeply.
“Six weeks. Is that too much to ask? Come on, guys; give me a break. Then you can all go back home to your internet porn and video games while I get a new batch of losers who will never touch real girls in their lives.”
Cobie raised his hand again. “You must get lonely here, Larry.”
“Don’t fuck with me, kid.”
Then Larry pointed at Max and said, “You. Arsonist. No more shit about burning down the cabin. Okay?”
Max nodded. “I was only joking. Besides, if Jupiter does burn down, they’ll probably stick us in Uranus.”
Everyone except Larry laughed. Even Robin Sexton, who obviously had a selective filter for the things he’d allow to pass beyond his toilet-paper gates.
Larry’s finger aimed at Robin. “And you. Jerkoff. There’s no wanking allowed in this cabin. You think I didn’t hear you last night?”
Robin twitched his fingers and said, “Huh?”
Then Larry pointed at me, “And you. Marcel Marceau.”
Well, at least I wasn’t first. But I did look down at my bare knees to confirm I was wearing short pants, and not the Pierrot costume, which may have saved my life in another time.
I waited, but Larry didn’t have any warning for me. All he said was this: “You just keep shutting up and we’ll be totally okay with each other, dude, as long as you don’t kill yourself.”
Then Larry stood up and looked at his wristwatch.
“Now get outside and look at that big yellow thing in the sky. It’s called the sun. You have thirty minutes till lunch.”
And that was our first cabin meeting.
One of the inventions my American father came up with—this was years before I arrived in America—was a device that helped him sleep better at night.
The problem with Jake Burgess’s sleep patterns had nothing to do with him. My mother, Natalie, snores terribly. I sleep downstairs from them, and even with my door closed I can hear her nightly snores. I can imagine a similar sound being produced by a giant tree stump being dragged by a tractor down a rough asphalt roadway.
When Max was only two years old, Jake Burgess went to work on what he called a snore wall. The device was rather small—about the size of a deck of playing cards—so it could stay on the mattress between Jake and Natalie. When activated, the snore wall emitted a pulse of electric-charged microwaves that rigidly locked the molecules in the air above it in a perfect line, so they could not be agitated by sound waves.
Natalie could snore like a sumo wrestler on her side of the snore wall, but Jake wouldn’t hear a thing.
Jake Burgess was very, very smart.
Unfortunately, the first successful time Jake used his snore wall, two passenger jetliners crashed when they collided with the barrier in the skies over their house in Sunday.
Jake never used the snore wall again, but the Merrie-Seymour Research Group paid Jake an awful lot of money for the device.
That was the kind of research Jake Burgess was good at.
Too bad for all those people in the planes, but progress, you know, marches onward and will eventually trample anyone sleeping in its path.
Jake invented all kinds of crackpot things for the Merrie-Seymour Research Group. Max warned me about them. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if Max was actually making the t
hings up in his head just to scare me.
That’s where Alex, our crow, came from.
It’s another story entirely.
THIS IS WHAT WE DO AT CAMP
All the planets were tied for last place, depending on how you looked at things.
You could just as well claim we were all racing in yellow jerseys on that night after the cancellation of the archery competition. Every planet in the solar system of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, including the abandoned ones, had a score of zero.
I was uncertain what rewards winning at the end of six weeks at camp would bring; if the object of winning in itself provided its own intrinsic riches. But I had been in war, and that was somewhere none of the other kids at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had been. So perhaps I had a polluted perspective on the whole notion of winning—of beating your rivals—and what that meant in the overall scheme of things.
But this is what we do at camp; winners make losers, and losers make winners.
Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys’ mess hall wasn’t much of a hall. It was a massive structure that some people might describe as a pavilion, a minimalist construction of more than a dozen or so log stilts that supported a peaked and shingled roof with lots of picnic tables beneath it. And all the tables were notched and carved, too. It seemed that the most popular word in camp-carving language was fuck, but I didn’t look at every single tabletop, so I can only estimate.
A few weeks after I came to America, I thought it would be nice if I could invent a new language. I didn’t tell anyone about it, because the first thing people say to you when you tell them you are making up a new language is this: “Say something in it.”
I wasn’t ready to start saying things yet.
I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for me or you. Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages. In any new language, there should only be we.
We do everything, and everything we do, we do to us.
That would have to be the first rule.
At dinner we sat beneath the pavilion roof and ate hamburgers and mashed potatoes with gravy. There was red Jell-O, too. I’m not sure what flavor the red Jell-O was supposed to be. It was sweet and rubbery. And red. Robin Sexton spooned some of his red Jell-O into the diamond-shaped opening on the paper carton of low-fat milk that came with every camper’s meal. Then he closed it and shook it up. Robin Sexton drank it. What dribbled from the corners of his mouth looked like salmon-colored vomit. He also put his mashed potatoes and gravy inside his hamburger.
Max just stared at the kid. Max didn’t eat much.
It was a very strange meal. The planets segregated themselves as planets will do, locked in isolated orbits at separate tables. So as much as we probably did not like each other, the four boys of Jupiter sat alone near the outer edge of the pavilion.
Although other counselors sat among their wards, Larry chose not to eat with us.
Some of the counselors brought acoustic guitars to the pavilion. At the end of dinner they were going to sing to us and teach us camp songs, because this was all part of rediscovering the fun of being boys.
“If anyone attacks, we should all run that way,” Max said. He pointed to an opening at the edge of the yard that led into the trees of the surrounding black woods. We had walked the trail with Larry that morning before the archery disaster. About a half mile down the path was a spring that filled a cinder-block well house with icy water.
“Are you always thinking about escape routes?” Cobie Petersen asked.
Max nodded. “It’s what I do.”
Cobie said, “Who would attack, anyway?”
“Some of those fuckers from Mars look like psychopaths.”
Max had a point.
“Hey. Kid. Kid.”
Cobie made an attempt at getting Robin Sexton’s attention. He waved his palm in front of the kid, but Robin had his face down over his Styrofoam plate so that his nose was just an inch above what remained of his hamburger bun.
Cobie Petersen tapped Robin Sexton’s head and pointed at his ears.
“Huh?”
“Take that shit out of your ears.”
Robin tweezered his fingers into his ears and popped out the two compacted beads of toilet paper. They were impressively large. Also, one of them had a smear of pumpkin-colored earwax on it.
“What?” Robin said.
Cobie Petersen asked him this: “Were you really jerking off in bed last night?”
All the eyes of Jupiter were riveted on Robin Sexton, who, despite the dimness of evening, turned visibly red and bit his lip. This concerned me. I slept about sixteen inches away from Robin Sexton, and so did Max.
“No,” Robin said. But if the boys of Jupiter could act as a fair jury, Robin Sexton would have been convicted on the spot.
Robin added, “I. Uh. I sleepwalk. I had to make myself stay awake.”
Cobie Petersen shook his head. “Jerking off is not a good way to keep yourself awake, kid. It just makes you tired.”
Max nodded. “Punching the clown puts me to sleep, too, but I would never do it in Jupiter, with all you other dudes around. Gross.”
I was horrified. This was not the first time since coming to America I had to sit through a conversation about jerking off. Max even talked about jerking off in front of our parents! They never knew what he meant, though, because he’d make up his own words for it, like punching the clown. Sometimes he’d talk about helping his best friend get an oil change, or going out for a shake with my best friend. But one night, he explained it to me in excruciatingly clinical detail. Max told me that all “normal” American boys constantly cooked soup, and that I’d have to stop acting like such an uptight immigrant kid and loosen up. And a number of the boys in my classes at William E. Shuck High School talked about jerking off as casually as you’d talk about going to the movies, or what you ate for lunch.
Robin Sexton swallowed hard and then only stared—at Cobie, then Max, then me.
Then he replaced his toilet paper earplugs and put his face back down in his food.
Dinner ended with the agonizing song-singing that was a scheduled nightly event at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. Larry came back from wherever he’d been hiding, and the six counselors, with two guitars, a tambourine, autoharp, and a cowbell, commanded all the planets to join in singing three songs I had never heard before. The first two songs were called “Kum Ba Yah” and “Do Your Ears Hang Low?”
And I was not the only boy unfamiliar with these songs, since they played no part whatsoever in the culture of video gaming and social networking. So the counselors passed out photocopied lyrics sheets and made us sing, sing, sing, until we got the songs stuck in our heads for good.
Also, the counselors encouraged us all to sing the word balls instead of ears during our multitudinous renditions of “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” Everyone thought this was very daring and funny. I thought it was as demented as having a conversation about punching the clown over dinner.
But the worst thing was the third song. Nobody except the counselors and Max knew the third song, because it did not exist anywhere outside the solar system of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. Max knew it because he’d been required to sing this same song during his summer at fat camp. The song was called “Boys of Camp Merrie-Seymour,” and it went like this:
Merrie-Seymour Boys!
We’re Merrie-Seymour Boys!
We’re learning healthy habits,
Smart as foxes, quick as rabbits!
When people see us they turn and stare,
Merrie-Seymour Boys are everywhere!
We’re fit and strong, as hard as granite,
We come from every single planet!
So cheer and make a happy noise—
For US, the Merrie-Seymour Boys!
For US, the Merrie-
Seymour Boys!
When we shouted “US” in the last lines, we were supposed to clap. We looked like thirty-two (now that Bucky Littlejohn had been hospitalized) barking circus seals. I clapped, but I did not shout. I did not even sing. I moved my mouth like a beached trout and pretended. But the counselors made the boys sing the song at least a dozen times until we were loud enough to please them, all clapped with a reasonable sense of trained-seal rhythm, and had the inane lyrics permanently ingrained into our memories.
Larry was in a good mood while we were singing, but not because of the songs. He was in a good mood because he was drunk. We didn’t find out about the bottles of vodka and other stuff Larry kept hidden in the counselors’ clubhouse until later, but he was drunk, and I could tell, even if the other boys of Jupiter didn’t notice such things.
Before bedtime, all the planets retreated to their individual campfires. I’d heard stories from some of the boys at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys that when they stared into their fires they frequently hallucinated they were playing a video game.
The boys of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys were seriously damaged.
Larry told us we all needed to go take showers and brush our teeth before he’d light the fire, but we whined and complained about showering in the spider cave, so he backed off and told us we could go ahead and stink if we wanted to.
But he added a warning: “If it reeks like ass and feet in Jupiter tonight, I’m kicking all you fuckheads out and you’re hitting the showers—dark, spiders, fucking Sasquatches, whatever.”
I was unfamiliar with this new word—Sasquatch—but the other boys seemed to understand what Larry meant and take it in stride. Robin Sexton always had the same take-it-in-stride look on his face, anyway, probably on account of the toilet paper in his ears and not being confronted about masturbation, so who could tell whether that kid had any clue what Larry was talking about? Considering the preceding modifier Larry used, I assumed that a fucking Sasquatch was American slang for a sexual deviant who preyed on boys at summer camp.