It was exhausting, but he knew the argument going on was useful in that it would certainly keep him awake — he couldn’t possibly think of resting while it was all going on. And that’s how he got the idea that he got. He smiled to himself, laughing even, knowing he’d come up with the best solution possible to the problem of the underground whispering plaguing the consciences of the beasts. He couldn’t wait till morning to announce the plan and put it into action. It was so good he found himself cackling all night, in sudden and helpless bursts. It was the best plan, the only plan.
CHAPTER XXXI
Max woke up before dawn, cold and wet with dew. He had somehow fallen asleep, and now he was hungry and thirsty and, he realized with a shudder, he hadn’t moved his bowels since he’d left home. His fur smelled terrible and now had a green tint to it — the lagoon water had been full of algae and had gifted Max its thick stench.
And there was no sign of anyone.
But he knew, at least, that he would make everyone happy this day. He had a plan and only had to find the beasts to enact it.
In the pre-dawn light Max could see the tracks they’d made, and could clearly make out Carol’s huge footprints, leading out of the meadow and toward the cliff. He followed them across the meadow, through a narrow stand of trees, and into a clearing covered with a strange moss, black and yellow, alternating like a checkerboard. Beyond it, the ocean was a frenzy of white. Max scanned the electric blue horizon until he saw what seemed to be a figure sitting on the edge of the cliff, the same cliff where they had howled together on Max’s first night.
He ran toward the figure, and when he got close he knew it was Carol, sitting forward, seeming tense.
“Carol!” Max yelled as he approached.
Without turning around, Carol raised his hand, demanding silence. Max stopped about twenty feet away, not knowing what to do next.
Carol remained staring out at the ocean, as if looking for a sign in the ripening sky. As it grew lighter, a crescent-shaped band of orange appeared above the line of the sea. Carol leaned forward, getting dangerously close to the very edge of the cliff.
And then, finally, when the liquid yellow of the sun at last broke through, Carol’s body relaxed, and then shook in waves, as if he were laughing or crying. Max couldn’t tell. But the spell, whatever it had been, was broken.
Carol turned around.
“Hey Max! You were wrong about the sun dying. Look, it’s right here.”
Max didn’t know how to explain.
“Don’t scare me like that again, okay buddy?” Carol said. He spoke cheerfully, as if the distant, rigid Carol of moments before had been illusory, that here was the real Carol, the one who loved Max’s brain and who knew how things were supposed to feel, who wanted only the right things to happen.
“How are you, King Max?” Carol asked, putting his hand on Max’s shoulder. “What happened to your fur? It’s kind of green.”
“Algae maybe? I don’t know,” Max said distractedly. He couldn’t worry about his fur at that moment. He wanted to know where all the others were.
“Well, Douglas is over there,” Carol said, pointing to a lump in the near distance. Max had walked right past him, thinking his body was an outcropping. “But I don’t know where anyone else is. Why do you want to know?”
“I have a plan,” Max said.
CHAPTER XXXII
Everyone was gathered around Max. Carol had woken up Douglas and Douglas had raised back his head and had made a bizarre and screeching sound of summoning. The beasts had arrived within minutes from all corners of the island. Everyone, that is, but Katherine. Max decided to proceed without her.
“Okay,” he said, “I have the perfect plan. What does everyone here want?” he asked, though the question, for him, was rhetorical.
“We don’t have homes,” Douglas said. “We’ve been sleeping outside because you wrecked them.”
Max was about to quibble with this claim, but he didn’t. He knew his plan would eclipse small concerns like Douglas’s. “Okay, fine,” he said.
“Some of us are hungry,” Alexander said.
“Okay, sure,” Max said. “What else? What do you want?”
“We want what we want. We want all the things we want,” Judith said, matter-of-factly. She brushed Ira’s mouth off her shoulder. He’d been chewing again, more than ever, it seemed. There were patches, purple and blue, all over her now, where the fur had been gnawed off.
Ira whispered something in her ear. She nodded. “Oh, and we want no more want.”
Max grinned. He really felt like he had the perfect idea to not only address all these concerns, but also those he had recognized himself — the need for togetherness, for camaraderie and entertainment and a sense of purpose. He had expected everyone’s first need to be fun, and guessed that they had simply forgotten that this was the first and foremost need of all. When he mentioned it, they would all smack their foreheads in an expression of Aha!
“What about fun?” he asked.
They all looked confused.
“Fun, like that lagoon business?” Judith asked. “If that was fun, I’d rather have someone eat my head.”
“No, no,” Max protested. “I mean real fun.”
“Oh. Real fun,” she said, nodding. “Wait. What’s that?”
“It’s like fun,” Max said, “but much better.”
They all thought about this, wondering if fun would be the solution. No one spoke up. Each was waiting for someone else to ask the obvious questions. There was a long silence, finally broken when Ira cleared his throat and spoke softly to his toes.
“I’m confused about fun,” he said.
Judith exhaled loudly. “Thank god someone said it. I was thinking the same thing. What does want have to do with fun, and what does all of this have to do with the void? Right, Ira?”
Ira shrugged. He was more confused than ever.
Carol shushed them both. “Fun sounds fine. We just need some clarification. Tell us what to do, Max.”
Now Max warmed up. He had come up with the whole plan in the many-colored meadow, and now he got to do something he was good at: explaining the game and outlining the rules. He was so convinced that his idea would bring everyone together and put them all in a near-permanent state of bliss that he was hesitant to just blurt it out. He decided to heighten the drama.
“You ready to hear the plan?”
They all nodded, hushed in silence.
“You sure?”
They nodded again. They were sure.
“We’re gonna have …” he said, his eyebrows rising and falling conspiratorially, “a war.”
“A war? Like a fight?” Ira asked.
Max nodded. “Yeah, we’ll pick sides and then battle.”
Douglas tilted his head and squinted. “And then everyone will feel better?” he asked, as if just confirming the obvious logic at work.
“Yeah,” Max said. “Pretty much.”
“And we won’t be hungry?” Alexander asked.
Max didn’t know, exactly, if a war would make Alexander less hungry. But then again, he thought, if Alexander was having great fun in the middle of a war, how could he possibly be thinking of food? “You won’t be hungry at all,” Max said confidently.
“And the void?” Ira asked.
“This is the opposite of a void,” Max said, though he still didn’t know what Ira meant by void. But if a void was an absence of something — or everything — then Max could assure him that the battle was anything but that. A void was small, and a war was big. A void was silence, and a war was loud, all-encompassing, full of astounding things to see and think about. If they were at war, how could they think about the void? Impossible.