Bit wakes, pulsing with dread. From his top bunk, Cole’s hand reaches out and pats him on the chest. Just sheep, Bit’s friend mutters, you’re okay.
Baa baa, murmurs Ike, still asleep in his own bunk.
Bit concentrates on ujjayi breath to calm himself, imagining the windmill in the back of his throat. The same nightmare has circled in Bit since he was little and Handy put actual sheep in the Sheep’s Meadow: not to exploit, he explained, they’re not pets and they won’t be eaten, but for their wool, which they gladly gave and which the Arcadians could sell. The kidlets loved the sheep; the women dreamed of woolen sweaters, lanolin on their chapped hands. Then Tarzan, who appointed himself shepherd, came down dizzy, with great open sores, and Astrid came speeding back from the hospital in Syracuse where the AmbUnit had rushed him, her hair wild, her face frantic. For hours, Abe and Handy and the midwives and Titus, the people who wore power in Arcadia then, conferred. That night, Bit woke to an unfamiliar stink. He crept out of the Children’s Dormitory to follow the acrid smoke. He found a grim group of three in the meadow around a bonfire. When he came closer the fire turned gruesome, the bodies of the sheep in a ziggurat within the flames. Bit watched a lamb’s eyeballs explode. He sat in the darkness, struck frozen until Astrid, who stood apart from Hank and Horse, brought a hand up to push her hair from her face, and her arms were blackened to the elbows with blood.
When a certain pressure builds in Arcadia — overcrowding, not enough food, the strange hidden undercurrents that make the adults’ faces pinch — the sheep come back to Bit’s dreams; sheep springing through the dark like live torches, the stench of burning fat. Over and over they leap until, at once, the creatures turn toward Bit. They crowd him, open their muzzles, almost say something. He knows it is something he couldn’t bear to hear, and he wakes almost screaming.
For hours, he waits for sleep. Shortly before dawn, he gives up. When he rises, he listens for his friends’ breath to stir. They sleep on. He opens the window to air out the room, the awful dead creatures that are Ike’s feet, the mixed adolescent body stink. He carefully dresses in his shirt and jeans. His broken sneakers mouth open when he walks, toes lapping the air like tongues.
Through the Ado Unit Common Room, through the hallways, plaster gapping and lath exposed, down the smooth polished banister for silence. Through the Library, heaped with Whole Earth Catalogs, old New Yorkers, silverfished books dug up from the basement where the first inhabitants had stashed them: American Eclectic, Walden, News from Nowhere. Also Carlos Castaneda, Julia Kristeva, Herman Wouk, paperbacks scavenged from Dumpsters or bought for a nickel. He slips through the Eatery, redolent of last night’s enchiladas. It is early for the Breakfast Shift, who will soon clang pans and stir yeast and soy into scrambled yegg and wash the apples, wormy but good. All is still and nobody is awake but Bit.
Out in the black, he runs down the slate steps by touch alone. The encampments across Arcadia are dark, only a few bobbing lights from afar, the flashlights of people rising for the loo. From the Bakery, a rich bread smell rises. His skin prickles with cold; dew flings from his heels to his back. There is a sharp edge to the sky, pine tanging the air, stones scattering like live creatures under his step. He runs as fast as his legs can take him, very fast for a body small as his, then slows to enjoy the darkness softening in the woods.
A cardinal flushes from a bush, but he has forgotten his new camera that his grandmother has sent him. He thinks of returning, but the run back is so far, and daybreak won’t wait for him.
One breath before dawn, he climbs the hill.
At the top, in a cluster of sweet William above the pines, he sits to watch day begin to hatch its yellow. A hawk stretches its wings and swirls as it rises. The fog rolls from the ground like a blanket and swiftly covers the distant mountains, the fields, the Pond, the streams; covers Amos the Amish’s far-off barn, the thin lace that is Verda’s smoke. A hungry creature, the fog; it gobbles. It climbs up the Terraces with the crooked apple trees. At last, only Bit and Arcadia House sit turned toward each other, each alone on a hill, above the fog’s milky sea. Two islands, they are, brightening in the dawn.
The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spin into nothing. Beyond Arcadia hulk the things he has dreamed of: museums, steel towers, pools, zoos, theaters, oceans full of strange creatures.
He knows that his understanding of the Outside is imprecise, both gleaned and muted. It is whatever makes its way to his ears, the stories people bring with them, what he has read. He has never been away from Arcadia since the Free People arrived when he was a toddler, not unless he counts Verda’s cottage at the edge of the forest, a tiny atoll of one. There have been times he’s been offered a ride to Summerton by the Motor Pool, or the chance to go with Hannah to visit the university library in Syracuse, but every time he has said no thank you. He is frightened of the Outside: either that it will be all that he imagines or that it won’t be.
Claus, a Circenses Singer, delights in asking Bit questions fit for babies: How big is an elephant? What does a subway look like? How many people can Yankee Stadium hold? Bit can understand only vaguely why Claus laughs until tears roll down his cheeks when Bit answers: An elephant is as big as the Octagonal Barn? A subway is like a train of Volkswagen Beetles in a big steel tube? Yankee Stadium can hold. . two thousand people? twice the size of Arcadia, and the limit of how large he can picture a crowd.
You kids, Claus says, sighing back into his chair, wiping his face. You’re like some crazy jungle tribe with bones in your noses. A sociologist would have a field day with you.
Bit knows this isn’t true. They’re not ignorant or innocent. From the Tutorials he chooses after the State Lessons in the morning, he knows local botany, the classics of English literature, geometry, physics, human physiology. He has assisted with over six birthings down at the Henhouse. He and the other Old Arcadia kids know how to play a guitar, bake and chop wood, pull pots and spin flax, knit their own socks and cultivate grains and vegetables, structure a good story, brew Slap-Apple out of windfall apples, and make anything at all from soy.
He feels no lack. If he concentrates, he can imagine the world in its many forms: the humid density of the jungle; the desert’s clean rasp of sand; the cold clarity of the Arctic. He imagines cities as larger Arcadias, but harder, meaner, people walking around thrusting cash at each other. He has seen the coins like embossed washers, the bits of green paper. Humans out there are grotesque: Scrooges and Jellybys and filthy orphans in the caverns of blacking factories, in lonely depopulated homes, a blight called television like tiny Plato’s caves in every room. It is grimmer in the Outside. There is a war in the Falkland Islands, there are Sandinistas and Contras, there are muggings and rapes, terrible things he has heard the adults talking about, has read about himself when he can find an old wrinkled paper in the Free Store. The president is an actor, placed in power to smoothly deliver the corporations’ lies. There are bombs among the stars and murders in the inner cities, red rain over London, there are kidnappers and slaves even now, even in America.
He has decided that he will leave for college when he is eighteen to study, to learn the magic of pulling images from the darkroom bath. He thinks of Erik at the send-off party, his flabby face radiant with the anticipated glamour of the Outside. Bit will borrow that same glamour for a few years, then come back to Arcadia forever. It will take him every day from now until he leaves to ready himself for what awaits him. He knows his only weapons against the threat of the Outside are knowledge and words: when anxiety bubbles up under his thoughts, he has to say Hannah’s name a hundred times or recite “Desiderata” until the words lose their meanings. If his thoughts skirt close to the forbidden, or he dreams stickily of little Pooh, who is only twelve but with a sweet body and full lips, or if, after his German lessons with Marlene, he runs to the darkroom to relieve the pressure in his pants, he makes amends to Helle in his head. He memorizes poems, and tells them in her direction: She walks in beauty, he thinks. One man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face, he thinks. And even with knowledge and words, he feels sometimes the dark news from Outside could crush him. He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance. This is the most magnificent thing about Arcadia, he knows. It is the shell that protects them.