The wind rises. A rock presses against his sitz bone, and the tide of fog draws off the hill. The first Breakfast Shift will be swarming up to Arcadia House. His face has dried, and the skin pulls taut. He can tamp down the nameless longing that arises in him only by running from the mountain as swiftly as his legs can go.
Bit returns to Arcadia in the full light of morning. He is wrung out. The woods seem deeper in the new light, less benign, like the dark forests in the Grimm book that peopled his childhood with nightmarish creatures. He finds a bush heavy with serviceberries and fills the belly of his teeshirt until he has to take it off and tie it into a sack so he can carry them all.
He can smell Arcadia before he sees or hears it: the loos are being pumped today. The Agri Unit will compost the shit, mix it with straw, and spread it on the fields for manure. The Sanitation Crew is already at work.
In the distance, he hears people shouting, the daily Trippie meeting where all the freaked-out, strung-out, acid-wracked gather to tell their dreams. The hope is that they can be returned to themselves by community and love, though only a few have succeeded. The Trippies arrive every week, an endless stream of the damaged. Each one is given two adult Minders, who keep him safe. Though his conscience pings, Bit is glad he is still too young to work full shifts. He hates minding Trippies, their anger and fear so raw it seems to infect him as well.
Bit walks into the Sheep’s Meadow, the grass verdigris with dew. He puts down his berries and pulls a clump of new clover from the ground and scrubs and scrubs at his face until it feels fresh and the traces of his tears are gone. Goldfinches dart like flying fish from the grass, into the sun, back into the grass troughing and cresting in the wind. At last he feels strong enough to brave the Eatery, the jostle of breakfast. The women will pet him for the berries, he knows. Maybe, even, they will let him take seconds of bread. He cradles the fruit against his bare chest and begins to run again.
He has to go water the Pot Plot. Hannah, busy in the Bakery, had asked him; but before he knows it, he is swept into a work unit. Cole and Ike go off together to the gardens and, with a fluttery feeling in his chest, he wants to tell his best friends to stop, to wait up for him, knowing he can slip out of weeding easily. But Helle has partnered herself with Bit somehow. She is already talking.
. . can’t work outside, she’s saying, and she slides the neck of her teeshirt over her shoulder; he sees her sun-blistered skin. He wants to lay a hand on it, to feel its feverish heat, but just the pressure of the thin shirt is enough to make her wince. She is not wearing a bra. Let’s do a Newbie shift, yeah? she says. In a lower voice, she says, See if I can score some downers.
Oh, he says. He looks at her slantwise, wondering about the drugs. She sees and says, Why do you hate me now, Bit?
I don’t, he says. I mean, I really like you.
I really like you, too, she says, squeezing his forearm. Her bitten fingernails, her cold hands. You’re the only guy here except for my brothers who isn’t always hitting on me.
There is so much he can say to this that he goes quiet. They walk together in silence toward the Gatehouse and Newbieville, that sprawl of canvas out by the County Road. He thinks of the pot plants on their little island drooping, curling at the edges of the leaves, and has to concentrate on the next step on the soft ground, then the next to keep from breaking into a run.
Because, beyond the oppression of his duty, something under his lungs hums with happiness to be walking beside lovely Helle. His attention has sharpened. Every leaf is in clear focus, the weave of the birdsong both intricate and glassy. In the distance, people are bent over the garden. A man carrying water in a bucket to workers is one of the dozen mutton-chopped cats in Arcadia these days who call themselves Wolf. Wolves come and go: Bears and Foxes and Hawks and Falcons and Jackals roam. The women are Rainbows, Sunshines, Summers, Rains, Meadows, Stars. Every day there are new Crows, new Autumns. It is hard to know everybody. At the movies projected some nights on the Octagonal Barn, vivid underwater explorations narrated by a Frenchman or strange, sad black-and-white flicks (piles of bodies in Auschwitz; an eyeball sliced open), Bit will sometimes look up and see clumps of strangers. He will peer around, panicked, to find some familiar face. There are good Newbies who believe in work and poverty and simple food. And there are others, freeloaders, Trippies and Runaways, people hiding out here, diluting the pure beliefs of the Old Arcadians.
Helle says, So many new people. I wish we had some way to weed them. Constructive criticism doesn’t work if you don’t give a shit about the people around you.
In his surprise, Bit dares to look Helle full in the face. She beams at him, Handy’s magnetic smile, and with her tongue clicks the new retainer she finagled from her time in the Outside. It’s a flesh-colored crab in the cavern of her mouth, endlessly fascinating.
How did you know what I was thinking? he says. He hopes she can’t read minds.
We’re alike, she says. You and me. We notice. What you’re thinking is written all over you. Like, yesterday, at the Photography Tutorial, you were looking really hard at this trail of ants. I could see you start to imagine yourself as one of them. Thinking about dismembering a grasshopper, how huge it was to your tiny size, how you would drag it underground, and then about the darkness down below, all the trails and little caverns and halls, and then what it smells like, what it’s like to live in full-body armor. It seems like everybody is so busy that nobody else notices things like that. Except for you.
There is a swimming feeling in Bit, to be read as casually as a paragraph.
They have arrived at Newbieville. Lisa holds a clipboard while Scott takes down the names of the people who have shown up this morning. They are the usual suspects: Trippies with their leathery faces and wild auras, a pregnant mother with two hungry-looking children, a young couple necking on an orange towel. Lisa’s face looks weary; there are blue marks under her eyes.
Here you are, she calls to Bit and Helle, and turns and calls out two names from the board: Armand Hammer and Penelope Connor. One is young, a beefy Runaway with a nail through his infected septum. Every few seconds, he sniffs in what’s oozing from the sore and winces. The other is a Naturist, a sixty-year-old woman with firm breasts and gray streaks in her bush.
Lisa says cheerfully, Congratulations. You have proved to us that you are willing and able to do the work we ask of you and have spent the required month in Newbieville. Now you are welcome to join our Community.