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A fraction of a second before the rope looped around me pulls t
aut, my fingertips touch stone. I grab it. Then I’m bounced up as if on a bungee cord, the force of it almost dislodging the tablet from my hands. I cradle the tablet against my bare chest, feel grooved lettering engraved into it.
I surface out of the water in a spray of white, my body reduced to one gigantic mouth gasping for air. Epap and David see the tablet and pry it from my tired arms. They leave me in the water, clinging to the side, barely able to hang on.
By the time I heave myself onboard, my body flopping wet and heavy, they’ve all huddled around the tablet. Heads pressed together and angled, they’re reading the words chiseled into stone:
STAY ON THE RIVER.
—The Scientist
Their mouths are cracking open. A chorus of giggles and laughter leaks, then bays out. They are all smiles and astonishment and delirium.
“I told you! I told you! I told you!” Ben is shouting, slapping everyone on the back. “He’d planned this all along!”
Sissy is standing, hands clasped to her mouth, her eyebrows arched high, tears brimming in her eyes.
“I knew he’d come through for us!” Jacob shouts. “The Promised Land! He’s leading us to the Promised Land. Of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine!”
Sissy’s face breaks into a smile that almost feels like physical warmth. Her eyes close in relief. “How did you know the tablet was under us, Gene?” she asks.
I pause before speaking. My father would often play treasure-hunt games when I was a toddler, leaving me clues around the house. I remember how flustered I’d become, unable to find the clues I knew were there. He’d force me to slow down, take deep breaths, survey the scene with equanimity. He’d say: You’re looking but not seeing. The answer is right under your nose. And almost inevitably, once I calmed down, I’d find the clue wedged between cracks in the floor, laid between the pages of a book I’d been holding the whole time, or placed in my very own pocket.
But I don’t tell them any of this. “I was just lucky, I guess,” I answer. I start to shiver, the wind gusting blades of ice into my body. I’m only wearing underwear, having taken off my clothes before diving in.
One of the hepers says something; a burst of communal laughter follows. Sissy rejoins them, clapping her hands. So much emotion gushing off of them.
I walk into the cabin where I’ve left my clothes in a pile. I strip off my underwear, wring it with shivering hands and arms. I can still hear them guffawing, their eruptions of laughter hee-hawing back and forth. I don’t understand why they have to so demonstrably display what they’re feeling. Can’t they simply feel their emotions without needing to project them? Maybe captivity has stunted them, rendered them incapable of intuiting another’s emotions unless it’s spelled out for them in a vomit of colors.
They start giggling now, talking about the Scientist this, the Scientist that. This is the confirmation they’ve been looking for. The sign that the Scientist never left them, or betrayed them, that he is in fact waiting for them at the end of this path. For them.
And not for me.
Me, he abandoned in a metropolis of monsters. To fend for myself. A boy who cried himself to sleep and wet himself in bed for months afterward. But for them he created an elaborate escape plan involving a journal (clearly meant for them to find), and a boat to lead them to the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine.
I hear another giggle, then another, their laughter like taunting jabs. I am about to tell them to shut up when I realize they have, in fact, fallen into a silence that is as sudden as it is eerie. I glance through the cracks in the cabin wall. I can’t make out very much, just David and Jacob raising up the stone tablet. Quickly, I slip into my dry clothes and walk out of the cabin.
They’ve stood the tablet up on its base and gathered behind it. Water is still dripping out of the grooved letters and down the face of the tablet, forming a puddle on the deck. I read the words again.
STAY ON THE RIVER.
—The Scientist
But the Dome hepers are looking not at the front of the tablet but the back. Their eyes, seeing something I cannot, are wide with shock as they travel up the tablet, past the top rim, and fall on mine.
“What?” I say.
Slowly, they turn the tablet around for me to read.
Four words. Four words that will become as indelibly etched in my mind as they are permanently chiseled into the stone tablet.
DON’T LET GENE DIE.
The first words in years from my father for me, about me. A whisper from the past, growing into a breeze, then gusting into a blaze. A skein of electricity jolts through my body and I feel the crackling of ice thawing in my marrow. And though it is a surge of light and hope and strength that flows through me, all I can do is collapse to my knees.
Jacob and David are the first to reach me, and they’re picking me up. I feel their hands clapping me on my back, their voices loud but no longer jarring, their bodies pressing against me but somehow no longer intrusive. Their arms sling over my back as they hold me up, wonderment spreading across their faces. Smiles break out, and their eyes are warm with welcome. Sissy’s eyes clench shut as she presses her balled hands to her lips in excitement. When she opens her eyes to look at me, they are hot and tender.
“I knew it,” she says. “It’s no accident that you’re here, Gene. You were always meant to be with us. To be a part of us.”
I don’t say anything, only feel river water dripping down my body. A wind picks up and my body shivers. She wraps her arms around me and gives me a hug. I’m still wet but she doesn’t mind.
“Don’t be a stranger anymore,” she whispers into my ear, so softly, the words can only be meant for me, and she pulls me in closer one last time before we separate. Her face and the front of her chest are damp as she throws the blanket Ben has just brought over across my shoulders. Sunshine pours down on the boat, on the river, on the land, on us.
3
WHEN I WAS in second grade, on the night I was almost eaten alive, I sat alone in the corner of the cafeteria. It was early for lunch, and the relative emptiness of the cafeteria would be a large reason for my survival that night. In commemoration of the Ruler’s Birthday, special synthetic steaks that were particularly bloody and flesh-textured were served up for lunch. Everyone ate with zest, teeth ripping into the steaks, blood oozing down chins and into dripping cups.
I bit into the faux meat and felt the ooze of blood seep out like water from a sponge. It was hard to ignore the gamy texture. I had long overcome the gagging reflex that biting into bloody synthetic meats used to induce, but this new, commemorative meat was especially noxious. I breathed in deep, controlled inhales, careful not to let my nostrils flare. I closed my eyes in fake delight, and bit into the chunk of meat one more time.
I felt a prick of pain in my upper gum that almost made me wince. I paused, my teeth still sunk into the meat. Blood collected in the cavity of my mouth. I let it flow out. Down my chin. Into the dripping cup. Took another bite. This time, the pain shot out in a bright flare, radiating around my skull. It took everything to stifle a cry. Teeth still sunk into meat, I kept my eyes closed, as in bliss, willing the gathering tears to dissipate from behind my eyelids.
And it was from behind the black curtain of closed eyes that I first heard the eruption of hissing and neck-snapping. Building in volume, stemming from all four corners of the cafeteria. I waited a few more agonizing seconds until certain my eyes had dried before opening them.
Students were twitching with excitement, saliva now mixing with the blood pouring down their chins. A few were attacking their steaks with renewed fervor, mistakenly believing that the tantalizing aroma stemmed from the meat in hand. Others, the older students, were lifting their noses into the air and sniffing. They were detecting something else altogether.
I bit into the meat again, not fully comprehending what was going on. I was only in second grade, after all. I was only a young boy, a little runt. Again, a jolting stab of pain in my gums. Blood sopped o
ut, collecting in my mouth. But something was different about the blood.
It was warm.
I did not understand. I pushed the overflow of blood out of my mouth, felt the warmth even more keenly on the skin of my chin.
And almost instantly, everyone in the cafeteria stopped eating. Hisses broke out, loud and inquisitive. A few students leapt up on their chairs, their necks snapping instinctively.
I moved my tongue across the upper row of teeth. Starting from the back tooth, moving from tooth to tooth, over the rough crevices, over the pointed tip of the fake fangs I inserted every dusk. My tongue slid over my two front teeth, over the first, then—
Where my other front tooth should have been, there was a gap.
My tooth had fallen out.
I stood up. Half the cafeteria was standing or crouching on their seats now. Even the kitchen staff, on the other end of the cafeteria, stopped working. Only the table of kindergarten students, mistakenly believing the aroma to be from the faux meat, kept on eating, eyes wild, jaws chomping.
I grabbed my dripping cup. Pretended to drink from it, but behind the cover of the chalice, I pressed my lips together, forming a tight seal. I let the blood pour over my chin, down my neck, onto my clothes. To cover over the heper blood as much as possible.
I put the cup down, walked slowly, casually out. When I felt a set of eyes fall on me, I bent over to do my laces, pretending I had all the time in the world and not a single concern. I walked out, one step at a time, sucking at the gap in my teeth, sucking my own blood down my throat, not wanting a single drop to escape my mouth, swallowing and swallowing and swallowing.
I forced myself to walk down the hallway. I willed myself not to cry. I almost lost control over my bladder and that would surely have meant my demise. But I controlled it all. Seven years old, clenching my eyes, my bladder, my face. Refusing fear, refusing emotion to make the faintest dint on my face. My father had taught me well.
My classroom was empty—everyone was at lunch—and after I closed the door behind me, I almost faltered. Almost gave in to the fear and the panic, almost let the tears and blood and urine come seeping out in a deluge of surrender and fear. But I gathered myself and lifted up my deskscreen. Still sucking and swallowing the blood, making sure that none of it dribbled outside my lips, I typed in my father’s e-mail address. My fingers shook as I pressed each key. It was a simple message, a message he’d taught me to use in times of emergency.
