Mira Corpora
Jeff Jackson

DEDICATION

For Stephanie Eternal thanks: Alethea Black, Giorgio Hiatt, Anna Stein, and John McElwee.

“There is another world, but it is in this one.”

–Paul Éluard

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Epigraph

I Begin

My Year Zero

(6 years old)

My Life in Captivity

(11 years old)

My Life in the Woods

(12 years old)

I Continue

My Life in the City

(14 years old)

My Life in Exile

(15 years old)

I End

My Zero Year

(18 years old)

Mira Corpora

(my first fiction)

Copyright

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This novel is based on the journals I kept growing up. When I rediscovered these documents, they helped me confront the fragments of my childhood and understand that the gaps are also part of the whole. Sometimes it’s been difficult to tell my memories from my fantasies, but that was true even then. Throughout I’ve tried to honor the source material and my early attempts to wrest these experiences into language.

I BEGIN

There’s an empty notebook in the bottom drawer of my desk. I place it on a flat surface. I fold it open to the third page. I tap my pen against the paper three times. Then I draw the picture of a door and beneath it write the word “open.”

The floor beneath me begins to shift. I keep my eyes fixed on the page, where the door is now ajar to reveal a staircase. I enter the page and walk down the steps. In pitch dark, I feel the way with my hands, running my fingertips along the walls. I move slow and breathe deep.

There is a bottom and my feet experience the relief of flat ground. I stand still and let my eyes adjust. A pinpoint of light beckons in the distance. I follow its faint glow as I move down the corridor. Soon I enter a round room with no windows. Torches encircle the rough stone walls. A wooden altar stands at the center of the space.

I look closer. A boy with alabaster skin—always alabaster—is tied to the altar with twine. He’s bare except for a modest loincloth and I can see the blue veins beneath his pale skin. A delicate specimen. His body briefly spasms in a struggle against his bonds, but it’s just a twinge of animal instinct without much conviction.

I’m careful to prepare this sacrament correctly. I start by plucking the stray hairs from the boy’s otherwise smooth chest. Soon his skin appears as blank as a page. A steel dagger lies next to the body. I grip it tightly. As I approach the empty surface, the blade feels as sharp as a quill. I’m ready to begin.

CHAPTER 1
MY YEAR ZERO
(6 years old)

“We never have to stretch our imaginations,

it is our own lives we can’t believe.”

–The Mekons

THEY TAKE ME OUT HUNTING FOR STRAYS. PEOPLE stride through the woods and shout things at one another. They practice propping guns on their shoulders and breaking them in half so the empty shells tumble to the ground. Everybody here is older than me. I’m small and constantly underfoot. It’s the afternoon, or something like that. Sunlight breaks through the trees to illuminate kaleidoscopic patterns on the forest floor. Pine needles, fallen leaves, patches of dirt. The pack of stray dogs barks in the distance. These are the first things I remember. Gunshots. Popping sounds. Little bursts of gray powder blooming from the end of each rifle.

Of course there are things before the first things: A stone farmhouse, warm meals served on white plates, a large room filled with narrow beds tucked with wool blankets. But this hunt is my beginning. The kids fanning through the forest. The slow-motion ballet of soundless steps. The silent chorus of raised rifles.

A bearded man orders all the children to circle up and divide into groups. A brother and sister pair pull my ears and claim me. “We want Jeff,” they chant. They say I’m their lucky charm. The siblings are both pale with spindly legs, denim shorts, floppy hiking boots. We set off into the heart of the woods. The boy’s crew cut ends in a braided rat’s tail. He flicks it back and forth across his shoulders. They both have beady eyes and big noses. There’s something else on their faces, but it’s not clear yet.

The boy hisses at me to keep up. My short and pudgy legs are sore, but I’m determined not to complain. There’s a chill from the intense shade of the forest. A trickle of snot tickles my upper lip. A pebble bounces around inside my shoe. When I break into a trot, I stumble on a tree root and fall. There’s something wet on my palms. Maybe it’s blood, or possibly only reddish mud. I can’t quite remember. The girl grabs my hand and tugs. She says: “Faster.”

An adult blows a whistle and the hunting parties halt at the blacktop road. We cross the highway together and pause in a clearing. Everyone stands so still that horseflies start to land on us. I see it now: Everyone wears masks on their faces. Black masks with sequins. White masks with feathers. Red masks with long crooked noses. Even I’m wearing a mask. Several of the adults crouch by a patch of raw dirt to examine the fresh claw marks left by the pack of dogs. You can hear the faint echo of harried yelps and shivering leaves as the animals hurtle through the bushes.

The dogs bark more loudly in the distance. The siblings have loaded me down with a heavy backpack. The nylon straps dig into my small shoulders. There’s a canteen in the outer pouch and the water tastes like cold metal. The siblings remain silent and converse by shifting the whites of their eyes. They seem to be intently following some unmarked trail. The boy scouts ahead and marks the path with spit.

The other groups are nowhere to be seen, but the electricity of the hunt surges around us. Bristling undergrowth. Rattled birdsong. Nearby gunshots. The boy and girl both throw their masks into the bushes. I follow their lead. We stop and listen to a series of high-pitched whines. My throat tightens. I know it’s the sound of a stray dying without knowing how I know. It’s a terrible sound. The siblings clutch their guns tighter. They’ll go off in a minute, but not yet.

We rest by a tree stump. The girl removes a pack of cigarettes from her denim shorts and the siblings each light up. “We’re not bad at hunting,” the girl says to me. “We’ve just got a different plan.” They pull the smoke into their mouths then exhale, over and over. Their faces seem ancient. The boy makes perfect smoke rings. I pucker my lips and pretend to blow circles in mute admiration. Maybe they’ve brought me along to teach me something. They whisper.

We stand in a clearing with a small tree. The girl kneels ceremoniously on the grass and unzips the inner pouch of the backpack. The boy instructs me to sit against a tree. The siblings shake some rope from the bag and wrap it tightly around the slender trunk. I mean, they wrap the rope tightly around me. They remove some glass jars from the pack and unscrew the aluminum lids. They smear my entire body with runny chunks of dog food and slimy kitchen grease. Some of the gritty brown paste sticks in my eyes and I blink it away. There’s a word they each keep using. The boy pronounces it with a slight stammer. He says: “B-bait.”

Even now I can still smell it: a foul stench, like overly spiced meat that binds me firmly to the clearing. The boy and girl shoot at the trees and watch the frenzied birds scatter into the far corners of the sky. They’re waiting for the dogs to arrive. Insects crawl onto my hands and swarm my knees. Ants, mostly. Once a butterfly lands on my elbow, purple wings still as its body twitches. It seems to be stuck in the tacky paste, its tiny feet frantically pumping up and down. I can almost feel its heart screaming.

I can’t stop coughing. My throat gags. I won’t let myself cry. The wind has fallen dead and the metallic chirp of the insects accompanies the siblings as they submerge themselves in the bushes at the rim of the clearing. The round black holes of their guns flit between the green leaves like a pair of watchful eyes.

I have no idea where the siblings have gone. I call for help, but there’s no reply. I can’t even remember when they left. I’m having trouble keeping up with what’s happening. The streaks of food have hardened and it feels like I’m trapped inside a thin shell. The sky turns the color of a peeled orange. The falling shadows start to obscure my sightlines. The edges of the woods vanish into nothingness.

The night is populated with shining green eyes. The pack of stray dogs surrounds me. They sniff the air and growl. Twitching noses, bristling whiskers. I remain perfectly still. When one of them bares its yellow teeth, I start to wail. A wet warmth spreads through my pants. They circle closer. There aren’t so many of them. Their movements are tentative and hobbled. Their thick brown coats are matted with tufts of dried blood. I’m surprised to find their faces are kind. We gaze into each other’s eyes. They begin to lick my face with their rough tongues.

The ropes I’ve been tied with are slippery. Maybe they’ve been this way all along. I wriggle loose from the tree, arch my back, and stretch my body. The clearing is empty. The moon is bright overhead. Bits of its light are mirrored in the shiny surfaces of the leaves. A fresh breeze combs through my hair and clothes. I feel strangely happy.

I walk in a perfectly straight line through the forest. I don’t know if this is the proper route, but I plunge onward.

The house appears in the distance. The stone farmhouse with the warm meals and the room full of beds. The place is lit up like an ocean liner. A silhouette of a boy waves to me from a bright upper window. I stall at the front gate with my hand on the latch, wary of the reaction to my return. A group of adults and older kids gathers in the yard. I can’t recall their actual faces. The adults seem glad to see me and calmly tell me that dinner is waiting. Nobody acts as if anything strange has happened. An older woman with calloused hands helps me change into fresh clothes, then leads me into the kitchen. I sit by myself on a wooden stool at the counter. The vegetable soup is still hot.

I lie tucked in my bed in the large room. The bodies in the neighboring rows are already asleep. My eyes are shut, but I’m sifting the day’s events for explanations. I suspect I’m remembering things wrong. Maybe nothing unusual happened after all. There is only the hypnotic sound of breathing, the enfolding comfort of clean sheets, the warmth of the wool blanket pulled to my eyes. This small drama approaches its end. The curtain begins its final descent.

No, wait, several nights later, I creep out of the pitch-black house, careful not to wake anyone. I venture back into the woods with a bulging backpack slung over my shoulders. I stubbornly trace a straight line through the landscape. Branches scrape my cheeks. Puddles soak my shoes. In the distance, several strays bay at the hidden moon.

The same clearing. The same sapling. I kneel on the soft grass in front of the backpack and unzip the inner pouch. Unfortunately there’s no rope inside, but I do have several jars slopped full of runny and half-rotted leftovers. I sit with my back anchored against the tree and lather a thorough coating of food over my body. It smells pretty strong, a mix of syrupy perfume and tangy mold. Now I wait for the strays to return. I try to remember the exact shape of their eyes.

Every time the wind scatters the clouds, I howl at the white moon. As my throat grows hoarse, it sounds like a tortured yelp. I repeat it over and over, but nothing stirs. The woods remain hushed. None of the strays takes the lure. They keep their own counsel.

The tips of the grass swirl in complex patterns. The surrounding bushes creak and rattle. Then a man breaks into the clearing. He seems familiar though his features remain blank. He shakes his head at the sight of me slathered in leftovers. I wrap my arms around the tree trunk and refuse to leave, but I’m too exhausted to put up a memorable fight.

I ride through the woods on the man’s back. My elbows rest on his shoulders, my legs dangle through his arms. The reliable rhythm of his steps rocks me toward sleep, though the feeling is less like settling into a dream than waking from one. The man lurches forward and I steady myself. My fingers fumble against a swath of fabric. He’s wearing a mask.

Waves of darkness, created by swiftly moving banks of clouds, roll through the forest.

The lights of the stone house blink on in the distance.

I can’t get rid of this smell.

CHAPTER 2
MY LIFE IN CAPTIVITY
(11 years old)

“The spilled drop, not the saved one.”

–Eudora Welty

I STARE AT THE RICKETY HOUSE ACROSS THE street. The girl’s bedroom is in the front: The window on the second floor with the black curtains. Usually she peeks out and stares at me with her round green eyes. She’s been watching me for days, but rarely acknowledges my presence. Today she’s refused to even make an appearance. Maybe she’s angry at me for stealing the oranges.

I sit alone in the dining room and wait for her curtains to part. It’s late afternoon. Slivers of sunlight filter into the room and gild the bookshelves surrounding the table. One beam falls on the bone china plate that holds the two oranges. An hour ago, I shimmied up the tree near the front door of the girl’s house and plucked the only two ripe pieces of fruit.

A noise upstairs jars me out of my vigil. The sound of my mother’s drunken footsteps rustling across the floorboards. It’s been days since I’ve seen her. She circulates through the house like a ghost, bumping into furniture. We’ve been living here on the edge of the woods for 116 days, according to the secret tally I’ve been keeping on the back flap of the peeling rose wallpaper in the bathroom. Or maybe it’s been longer. The tiny scrawls have almost merged into a single desperate slash. This is typical of our cycle. I’ve spent years moving from orphanage to orphanage. Every so often, my mother reappears to reclaim me. This time I’m eleven years old.

The curtains across the street flutter. I hold my breath waiting for the girl’s pale face to emerge, but nothing happens. I’m so distracted that I don’t notice the sounds in the house have grown louder. Then I realize my mother has appeared in the doorway. Something tells me to hide the oranges, but it’s too late and I’m too hungry.

Her blouse is wrinkled and there’s a stain on her pants. She clutches a crossword book in one hand and a glass of wholesale gin in the other. The alcohol threatens to slosh over the rim. She looks like she’s been blacked out for days. “There you are,” she says, as if I’m the one who’s been missing. She runs her fingers lightly along my back. Her touch feels like it burns.

She sits across from me and opens the crossword book, wetting the pencil lead with the tip of her tongue while scanning the horizontals and verticals. She’s been working on these puzzles forever but almost nothing has been filled in. The book is mostly white spaces and empty boxes. My mother silently eyes the oranges on the plate. It’s impossible to tell what she’s thinking. She doesn’t realize I haven’t had a real meal in days.

I start to peel one of the oranges with my fingers, digging my nails into the rind to create a seam that I can tear. My mother slaps my hand.

“Damn it, Jeff,” she says. “I can’t believe you don’t know how to peel a fucking orange.” She stands up and strides into the kitchen. While she’s gone, I nervously pick the lint off my green sweater. The house across the street remains motionless.

My mother reappears with a squat silver knife with a curved crescent blade. She holds out her palm and I hand her one of my oranges. She cuts away ribbons of rind, then chops the remaining white off the fruit at sharp, elegant angles. There are no clinging flecks of rind, no skin left at all, it’s shaved down to the juice, completely exposed. She places the glistening nude thing back on the plate. I’ve never seen anything so orange.

“Don’t worry about keeping it exactly round,” she says. “It’ll find its own shape.”

She slides the knife across the table.

“Your turn.”

As I begin to sheer the skin from the second orange, the curtains across the street flutter again. The girl’s hand pulls back the fabric and one green eye peers out. Then she vanishes.

“Don’t be so delicate,” my mother scolds. I’ve been carving the orange like a soap sculpture. I change tactics and hack off pieces with quick blunt strokes. It’s pretty easy, actually. I place the peeled orange on the china plate. I brace myself for one of my mother’s explosive rages, but she gives the fruit a cursory inspection and nods. Her highest form of praise.

She cuts both oranges into fat slices and takes a bite. I stuff an entire wedge in my mouth and slurp it down. It’s tart but juicy.

“Not bad,” she says. “Where’d you get them?”

“They gave them to me across the street.”

“Enjoy them,” she says. “You’re never going over there again.”

“Why not?”

My mother narrows her pupils and my blood chills. It’s clear that she’s contemplating throwing her glass of gin in my face. She raises her hand, but only takes another slice of orange.

“Because the man who lives there is a big fucking asshole,” my mother says. Her slate gray eyes keep me in their grip. “He’s a sex pervert. He just got out of prison and he’ll probably be arrested again soon.”

My mind races with this new information. All I can say is “okay.” I try to figure out whether the girl is the man’s daughter, or his niece, or something else entirely. I can’t decide if her expression held any clues. Before I only imagined her life in that window, but now a whole frame crashes into place around it. Maybe the girl wants to escape and doesn’t know how. As I take another bite, the fruit tastes different.

My mother turns back to her book of puzzles and hovers over a clue. I retrain my gaze on the girl’s window. We both reach for slices of orange and absently consume them, bite by bite. Neither of us speaks a word. There’s only the measured sound of our breathing. My mother tries out several letters, then sighs and erases them. The sun sinks low and I have to squint to see anything through the glare. It doesn’t matter because the black curtains remain closed. Soon the china plate is empty. A sweet and acid odor lingers. I ball the loose orange rinds into a roughly round shape. Something lodges itself under my nails and I carefully study those last flecks of iridescent pulp.

The house across the street is empty. The moon spills a faint light across its front lawn. The night before the man left town, I saw the girl sprinting across this stretch of grass. She was wearing a pale nightgown with a dark stain. She ran swiftly and silently past the orange trees and toward the woods. Then she seemed to vanish. I can’t stop thinking about her.

I lie in my darkened bedroom and stare out the window, fine-tuning my own plans to run away. This helps to keep my mind off the pain. It hurts every time I move. I’m lying on my stomach and can’t see how serious the injury is, but I can feel the blistered skin. Somewhere between my shoulder blades there’s a burn the shape of a clothing iron.

My mother enters the room with a jar of salve. She sits on the mattress and applies some to my bare back. It stings, so I grit my teeth and bury my face in the pillow. The wobbly swirl of her fingertips is a pretty good indication that she’s still shit-faced.

“Sometimes I think you ruin my things on purpose,” she says. “You have to learn how to do things for yourself. What are you going to do when I’m not around?”

There’s no point in answering, so I don’t.

She unrolls some gauze and lays it over the wound. She keeps adding layers, seemingly unsure how many are required. Her fingers poke and prod the sore while trying to fix tape to the edges. Once the bandage is secure, she turns on the bedside lamp to better examine her handiwork.

My mother starts to sob. She buries her face in her hands. Her entire body quakes. Wracking sounds. Uncontrollable. Normally I’d let the emotional storm blow over, but after a few minutes I reach out and rest my hand on her shoulder.

She slaps at me. “You little shit!” she shrieks. “Don’t touch me!” Her eyes are stretched wide and her teeth bared.

She stomps down the stairs. I remain in bed with eyes shut tight, not daring to stir. I map her movements downstairs through the unsteady clomp of her steps. It’s a radio play of stumbling sounds and muttered curses. She rustles from room to room, trying to remember her latest hiding place for the liquor. Rattling cabinets, unsticking drawers, scuffling across the wooden floor. Finally the jingling of a glass bottle and a loud belch.

My mother eventually lurches back up the staircase. The long pauses between steps are punctuated by the sound of swishing liquid. Her shadow briefly eclipses my doorway as she steers herself toward the master bedroom. Then there’s a loud thud, shaking the frame of the house. The familiar sound of her limp body hitting the ground. There are no further noises. She must be out cold.

I ease myself up from the bed. From the closet, I pull out the bag where I’ve packed my clothes, the edges padded with wads of bills that I’ve siphoned off my mother. Through my window, the empty house across the street gives off a haunted glow. The curtains have been stripped from the windows and a bald light bulb burns in a hallway somewhere, dimly illuminating the remaining nothingness.

There are a few things left to pack, including my cassettes of favorite songs taped off the radio. One cassette is still lodged in my walkman. I slip on the earphones and press play. My head floods with the sound of blown-out amps, drilling drums, and the faintest hint of a woozy melody. It gives me a dose of courage.

Still something is missing. I venture into the hallway and spot my mother’s feet sticking out from her bedroom. Her body is sprawled in a heap across the entrance, so I cautiously thread my steps through her arms and legs. It only takes me a second to find her nightgown, which is balled atop the dresser. It’s ruined with the imprint of a hot iron where I got lost in a daydream and let it sizzle into the fabric.

I slip the nightgown over my head. It fits surprisingly well. I inspect myself in the mirror. The unfamiliar reflection is an echo of the ghostly girl who lived across the street. It feels as if I’ve tapped into some of her mysterious spirit.

I grab my bag and ease down the staircase. The creak of each step feels like an earthquake, the recoil of the wood louder than any aftershock. Behind me, my mother murmurs a series of primordial groans. She starts to slur out my name. I bound down the last steps and hurtle out the front door.

I’m running across the lawn. I peer over my shoulder and spot the hunched silhouette of my mother at the upstairs window. I try to imagine the scene from her point of view, looking down at the pale specter in the nightgown streaking through the yard. Instinctively, I head for the woods at the end of the block. Tonight the sanctuary of trees resembles nothing more than an immense and yawning darkness.

I pull up the folds of the nightgown as I run. It feels light and flowing. The wind rushes up and blows against my legs, ballooning the fabric around me. I’m almost there. I can feel myself becoming swallowed by the darkness. I can feel the grass blades licking the soles of my feet. With every step, I’m waiting to disappear.

CHAPTER 3
MY LIFE IN THE WOODS
(12 years old)

“Suddenly he was saying under his breath, ‘We have a second home where everything we do is innocent.’”

–Robert Musil

I STALL AT THE EDGE OF THE CLEARING. FROM the shadow of the forest, I survey the scene. Plastic tents are ringed in the middle of a meadow. Along the perimeter, hammocks are strung between trees. The camp is mostly empty. Two girls race through the grass, waving lit sparklers. A couple of boys wrapped in wool blankets sit around a smoldering fire. Thin wisps of smoke rise in irregular puffs. I can’t believe I’m finally here.

I’d heard stories about a tribe of teenagers who set up their own society in a remote part of the woods. A kid claimed to know the way and for fifty bucks scrawled a map on the back of an old Chinese take-out menu. I hitched rides along logging roads, hiked through overgrown paths, climbed steadily higher into the mountains. It’s hard to remember exactly how I got here. And now that I’ve arrived, I’m not sure what to expect. I keep adjusting the pack on my shoulders. I wad the map into a tight ball. As I venture into the meadow, my entire body tingles.

The boys around the campfire greet me with easy smiles. The dogs sleeping in the grass bound up and lick my hands. Soon a few dozen teenagers emerge from the surrounding woods, returning from various chores and games. Everyone welcomes me to Liberia. We all gather firewood and share a dinner of lukewarm canned soup and petrified beef jerky. “You’ll get used to the food,” a girl with a ratty ponytail assures me. I find myself an empty woven hammock and fall asleep cocooned under a plastic garbage bag.

For the first week I’m there, it rains constantly. I help the kids with chores around the camp. The soles of my feet are perpetually soggy. The ghostly skin becomes so soft that I can scrape off ribbons of white flesh with my fingernail. Little mossy growths start to infest the scraggly hairs of my armpits. Even my cassettes begin to bloat with water and breed black spores. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been.

When the weather clears, I start to explore the woods. I tag along with several kids and hike out to an abandoned wild kingdom theme park. It closed decades ago, but nobody bothered to knock down the cement outbuildings, dismantle the cages, or even strip the rusted tilt-a-whirl for parts. We climb the fence and roam the grounds, trying to guess which animals were kept where. The kids say that after dark it’s popular to fuck in the cages. There’s a rumor the place is haunted. Not by ghosts, but gibbons.

They tell me how the park’s foreclosure dragged on so long nobody noticed when the monkeys escaped into the woods. They say the nearby towns have reports about the creatures attacking unsuspecting backpackers. Some kids believe these stories were invented to keep the truckers from bothering us. They say the truckers are worse than any gibbons. They brutally raped two girls who strayed too far from camp. Nobody could stop the bleeding.

Isaac swears the monkeys are out there. He’s spotted their shadows in the dark trees, darting limb to limb. He even saw one up close, crouched on the rusty Ferris wheel and chomping on a jagged leaf. It had a pink nose and inflamed ass. Lydia says they might really be out there, but she’s also been with kids who run through the forest and imitate the apes for a laugh. They scratch their pits and cling to low-hanging branches, whooping and yattering.

That night, I dream that I’m asleep in my hammock and awakened by a small white monkey. He perches on my chest and whispers stories to me, his furry mouth tickling my ear. He recites fantastical tales about his ancestors, the impregnable tree fortresses, the ornate weeklong banquets, the mysterious and coveted silver cup, the red poppy funeral garlands, the succession of betrayals that led to the tribe’s ruin. In my dream, I’m convinced these stories contain the secret of my own destiny. As he unfurls his saga, the creature observes me with its kind golden eyes.

I awake with a start and expect to see the outline of a tiny monkey scampering into the recesses of the forest. But there’s no evidence of any animal. The details of his stories have also evaporated from my memory. In the still of the night, I strain my ears for any sign but there’s no hooting or gibbering, not even the pinched chatter of kids playing at being wild.

The truckers come with guns. They’re drunk. Beefy red faces. Shallow pinprick eyes. They march into the center of camp and cock their rifles. All of them wear camouflage sweatsuits and orange flap jackets. It’s hunting season. They say they’ll give the kids a five-minute head start. To make things sporting. Maybe their original idea is only to scare the kids off the land. Watch them flee into the woods never to return. But the kids don’t budge. One of the truckers fires a shot in the air and someone screams. A rock is hurled. Another shot. The kids turn around to find a pregnant girl lying on the ground with a bloody blown-out stomach. Then things get ugly.

The hunters’ guns seem to fire at once. They explode throughout camp in a kaleidoscope of colors. Gleaming knives are drawn and brandished. The kids are in trouble and know it. They scatter in all directions. Kids running into the forest. Kids cowering behind trees. Kids with contorted mouths, red tongues lolling, screaming for help. Not that it makes any difference. They’re target practice. Bullets in the leg. Bullets in the chest. Bullets in the head. Crimson fountains of blood cascading into the air. The truckers are ruthless. Their thick black mustaches mask inscrutable emotions.

The kids beg for mercy. But the laws of decency are flouted. The truckers pour gasoline on the bushes and fan the day-glow orange flames. They saw off a boy’s limbs. There are faces without eyeballs, slick gray organs tumbling loose from chests, a human head planted on a makeshift spike. The truckers fuck girls in the ass. They fuck girls in the nose. They fuck a boy in his detached arm socket. One trucker pisses shimmering yellow streams on the corpses nestled in somber hues of grass. It’s a backwater holocaust. A bucolic apocalypse. A total extinction.

At least that’s the story the painting tells. It’s an enormous work that stretches across several canvases and it takes me a long time to absorb the details. The title: The Ballad of Liberia. Lydia created it over several months, hidden away in the woods, veiling her efforts under waterproof tarps. She unshrouds her masterwork in the meadow. Muted gasps are followed by an ecstatic round of applause. The thing is so over the top that everyone can’t help but love it.

It isn’t finished. Lydia has left some blank spots so people can express themselves, enter into the communal spirit, et cetera. We choose brushes and congregate around the long canvases. There’s a hushed air of reverence as we confront the lurid and savage details of the painting. People move between the cans of paint and start applying respectful dabs of color. Some outline the carcasses in majestic shades of purple. Others plop shiny pink dollops on the cheeks of the living. A few jokers apply their strokes to the backside of the canvas.

Daniel throws the first handful of paint. A red splotch that hits Nycette square in the chest. Isaac retaliates by hurling a fistful of yellow at Daniel’s face. Nycette pours purple paint on Isaac’s head for being presumptive. The mohawked girl takes Isaac’s side and flicks paint at Nycette, but ends up splattering my pants instead. Then Daniel empties an entire can of blue down the mohawked girl’s back. Just for the hell of it. And that’s when pandemonium really breaks loose.

Soon everyone is coated with paint. Some kids take refuge behind the hammocks, retreat into the woods, launch counteroffensives near the river. Laughter and shouting echo throughout the camp. Lydia and I are the only ones left by the painting. She sits beside the canvas, arms wrapped around her legs, chin resting on her knees, sulking. Her white tank top is a fresco of smeared pigments. Her frizzy red afro looks more unruly than usual. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to drag that much paint out here?” she says.

She asks if I’m an art lover. I say not exactly. She says nobody else seems to be one either. I ask if she thinks the truckers might really attack the camp someday. She shrugs. “People are capable of anything,” she says. While she adjusts the strip of silver duct tape that holds the bridge of her glasses together, her darting eyes give me a once-over. “You want to see my inspiration for the painting?” she says.

We hike through the forest to the abandoned theme park. She scouts to ensure nobody is lurking, then leads us past the empty cages toward the cement office buildings. They seem so boring I’ve never given them a second glance. In the back courtyard stands a narrow shed. A janitor’s storage room of some kind. “I haven’t shown this to anyone,” she says. “It gives me nightmares.”

The hinges of the shed are rusted shut, so she forces the door with her shoulder. It’s a small concrete room with dingy gray walls. Cobwebs in every crevice. Dust motes choke the air. The light is so dim that at first the place looks empty. Lydia digs her nails into my arm and gestures at the corner. “People are bastards,” she hisses. Then I see it. Against the back wall, pocked with scabby patches of gray mold, the mummified skeleton of a dog hangs from a noose.

The kids talk about the place in whispers. Everyone calls it the dead village, but the row of condemned houses on the edge of the woods is officially named Monrovia. It’s a failed settlement that no longer appears on even the most local maps. Briefly converted into an outpost by the forest rangers, the houses are now abandoned. These once stately structures are marked by decay, wood rot, flood lines, and scattered rubbish. The only inhabitants are three girls who are reputed to have occult powers. Kids occasionally leave camp to visit them and have their fortunes told. Most are too spooked to make the journey.

Lydia says there’s a treehouse that offers a view of the dead village. She leads a small group through the woods to see for ourselves. She blazes a fresh trail through the thick undergrowth of weeds and ferns. We follow the blue marks in the trees. They’re painted in the hatchet scores on the tree trunks. Every few minutes another blue slash appears. It’s the sort of code that you have to know to notice, a clandestine swath of color that beckons us forward.

None of us have laid eyes on the dead village. Isaac wonders what we’ll be able to distinguish through the thick foliage. Daniel suspects the place gives off a subtle supernatural aura. Nycette believes the derelict houses have absorbed some of the properties of the oracles who now inhabit them. I find it hard to imagine anything more mysterious than our own campsite. Lydia remains silent. She maintains the steady pace.

The sky darkens. Storm clouds press down upon the treetops. The first raindrops start to sift through the branches. Soon we’re soaked to the roots of our hair. Lydia says it’s only another hour to the treehouse. Several people turn back, but the rest of us march onward. We tent our shirts over our heads and train our eyes on the boot prints in front of us. The booming bass of thunder resounds in our chests. Flashes of lightning bleach the air. More people peel off, but Lydia never turns around. Even the overstuffed backpack strapped to her shoulders doesn’t slow her tempo. I’m not sure how long it takes her to realize that she and I are the only ones left.

Lydia halts in a clearing and peers up at the pelting rain. She wipes her frizzy red hair from her forehead and adjusts her glasses. I huddle beneath my sweatshirt and hug myself for warmth. “It’s right around here,” she says. She strolls under the trees, her head cocked toward their canopies, staring with the intensity of a hunter sighting game. She stops beneath a towering oak and signals to me. The treehouse is nestled high in its gnarled branches. We scale the wobbly rungs tacked to the trunk and squeeze through a narrow opening.

We find ourselves in a musty wooden room built with thick planks. Lydia lights the candles stationed in glass bowls along the floor. The place slowly takes on a cozy feel. Black garbage bags are tacked over the windows to keep out the elements. A stained mattress with rumpled sheets and a wool blanket is flopped in the corner. A sequence of faded magazine photos are taped to the wall: Shots of a naked couple walking hand-in-hand along the white sands of a beach. “I haven’t been here in ages,” Lydia says.

We’re both soaking wet. Lydia searches her backpack for a towel but it’s soggy as well. She instructs me to strip off my clothes and get under the blanket before I catch cold. I remove my T-shirt and jeans, but I’m too shy to take off my waterlogged briefs. She laughs and precariously balances her thick black glasses on my nose. “You can hide behind these,” she says. Everything appears slightly distorted, a filmy fish-bowl perspective. Lydia inspects how the glasses affect my features.

She kisses me. Her lips are rough and chapped. She peels off her wet tank top. Her neck and arms are slightly sunburnt, making her breasts seem almost lunar in their whiteness. Her areoles are a soft crayon pink. There’s a jumble of sensations: Her fingers through my hair, her tongue in my ear, her breasts in my mouth, her hand on my balls. Her wet skin feels slick against my body. She pushes us onto the mattress and straddles me. She slides me inside her and does all the work. I’m not sure whether I’m coming, but then I’m sure. We sink into the tangled covers and close our eyes. I don’t tell her this is my first time.

For a long while, there’s only the steady plink of rain against the roof. It’s impossible to say how much time passes before I realize something is wrong. My fingers are coated in a warm fluid. A small dark stain is spreading across the filthy white sheets. I sit up and discover my crotch is coated in blood. My cock is bright rust red with dark splotches and uneven coagulations. I’m freaking out, but Lydia isn’t the least bit alarmed. “Relax,” she says. “I must have gotten my period.”

I start to wipe myself clean with the sheets, but Lydia tells me to leave it. “It’s perfectly natural,” she says. “It’s beautiful.” She gets out of bed and squats over her backpack. Her perfectly round ass juts out like a baboon’s while she rifles through the contents. She produces a weathered sheet of notebook paper and unfolds it with a solemn sense of ceremony.

She explains that an old boyfriend visited the dead village and returned with his fortune etched on this sheet. The page is scratched with a few barely legible phrases: 150 times, Northwest Passage, and The one you lost. “It was a code written especially for him,” Lydia says. “He was obsessed with it. The main oracle, this girl named Sara, she’s the one who channeled it.” She presses the paper into my hands. “You can tell it’s the real thing,” she says. “It almost vibrates.” And it does. An uncanny pulsation thrums through the thin fibers of the page. Or maybe it’s just my hands trembling.

Lydia says her boyfriend ultimately figured out the prophecy and vanished one night without any goodbye. “He went off to pursue his destiny or whatever,” she says. She peels back one of the garbage bags to let the evening breeze filter through the window. She smoothes her red hair and stares into the final embers of the fading charcoal light. “I’m heading to the dead village tomorrow,” she says. “You should come with me.”

I’m not sure what to say. Somewhere outside the window are the sagging rooftops of Monrovia. I search for signs of life, but it’s hard to make out even the most basic shapes among the surrounding branches. The hazy landscape appears to swim before my eyes. It’s slightly disorienting. Then I remember that I’m still wearing Lydia’s glasses. I hand them back to her. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“Forget it,” she says. “It was a dumb idea. More of a joke, really.”

She produces a package of tinned sausages from her backpack. We eat in silence then blow out the candles. The treehouse feels smaller as soon as our shadows are scrubbed from the walls. Once in bed, she wraps the blanket around her tight as a shroud. In the middle of the night, snared in a dream, she makes faint growling noises. She clutches the oracle’s note tight in her small fist. I’m overcome by an urge to pull her close, to kiss her neck, to whisper sweet things in her ear. But she doesn’t stir and the urge passes and eventually I fall back asleep.

When I wake in the morning, Lydia’s not there. I climb down from the treehouse and race into the woods. I shout her name but the only answer is the echo of my voice and the screech of some startled birds. Instinctively I know she’s headed to Monrovia. I follow the blue spots on the trees, but I’m hesitant to go too far down the fog-obscured route. Before I return to camp, I spot the telltale signs. I kneel in the dirt and touch my finger to the series of her bitter-tasting droplets. The path to the dead village is marked by a fresh trail of blood.

We find the body at the bottom of the river. It has floated downstream and been snagged in the shallows by a dam of fallen twigs and branches. A teenage girl, lying there submerged, bobbing peacefully in the gentle current, strands of long chestnut hair mixing freely with the algae and underwater ferns. The first thing we notice: She wears a nondescript pair of fraying jeans and faded purple T-shirt. Second thing: None of us recognize her. Third thing: A rope is fastened smartly around her bulging neck.

It’s a clear case of suicide. Or maybe murder. Daniel figures the girl came to this remote sector of the woods to end it all in solitude, dangling herself from a branch over the river. Isaac thinks she was hiking into Liberia when some truckers intercepted her, maybe raped her, definitely strangled her. Nycette refuses to offer an opinion. She rolls herself a joint with trembling fingers and puffs away with fearsome determination. In her penetrating French accent, she keeps repeating the word “heavy.”

Nobody bothers to ask what I think. I stare at my watery reflection as it floats superimposed over the image of the girl. She’s flawlessly conserved in the cool current. Her lips a perfectly serene shade of blue. Her pink tongue protruding between her teeth, just so. Her eyes halfway open and unfocused on something they couldn’t see anyway. The expression on her face would seem sexual, except it’s too fixed to suggest any kind of desire. She looks beautiful.

The four of us hover on the banks of the river, everyone afraid to speak. Isaac finally announces that people at camp need to be warned in case the truckers strike again. Daniel counters that everyone is paranoid enough already and it’s irresponsible to panic them. They look to Nycette to cast the deciding vote, but she throws up her hands in exasperation. In the background, I pace the points of an invisible triangle.

It’s a stalemate. We leave the girl in the water and stare at her undulating corpse as if it’s an aquarium exhibit. Nycette anxiously braids and rebraids her blond dreadlocks while getting profoundly stoned. Daniel repeatedly pops the cartilage in his oversized nose, the only part of him that doesn’t conform with the suave pretty-boy image. Isaac sits cross-legged on a tree stump, wearing an expression so serious that his features seem squeezed into a single dot at the center of his bald head. I anxiously skip rocks several yards downstream.

Isaac is the one who breaks the silence. “So tell me this,” he says. “If we do keep it a secret, what the hell are we going to do with the body?” There’s another long pause punctuated by the plinking skip of stones. It’s Nycette who eventually answers. She exhales a fat plume of smoke. Her golden eyes are shining. “It is very simple,” she announces. “We will burn it.”

It turns out Nycette has done some reading about the rites and rituals of the Incas. According to what she remembers from a moldering anthropology text, the only honorable way to send off the dead is via funeral pyre. The flames release the soul from the cage of the dead person’s body. Set it free to travel to the afterworld. Greet its maker with a purified slate. Something like that.

Isaac rolls his eyes at Nycette’s spiritual talk, but this is obviously the perfect option. She reminds us that it’s small-minded to demean the spiritual traditions of esteemed ancient civilizations. Daniel suggests we start gathering kindling moss and fallen branches right away and reconvene tonight. He seems pleased about our secret and makes everyone swear a blood oath to return alone.

The last thing we do that afternoon is dredge the body from the bottom of the river. We wade up to our shins, stoop into the current, and each grab a limb. A cloud of silver minnows bursts from beneath the corpse and swarms our feet. We lift on the count of three. A one and a two and—. Waterlogged and rigor-stiff, the girl is heavy as a slab of stone. We heave her onto the grass. Her inert body looks as incongruous as the sculpture of an anchor displayed on shore.

When I return that night, the fire is already a thick column of light. Daniel stokes the white-hot embers and slots several plank-like pieces of wood across the top. “This is going to be good,” he keeps repeating to nobody in particular. He pulls his black mane into a ponytail and promenades around the blaze, surveying it from every possible angle. It’s unclear whether he knows what he’s doing or is simply excited to be in control.

Nycette smokes an extra-thick joint. Her pupils are tiny buoys of blackness in a sea of glitter. She stands over the body, confidently preparing the spirit inside for its journey to the heavens according to a set of half-remembered precepts. “We name her Mama Cocha,” she says. “We give her the name of the Incan sea mother.” She solemnly drapes her own shell necklace around the girl’s swollen throat. It almost covers the purple ring of clotted bruises.

Isaac stands with his back to the fire. The rippling shadows make his features flicker like an old tube television caught between stations. “You’re really okay with this?” he asks me. There is something unsettling about the ceremony, but I don’t want to break rank with the group. So I shrug my shoulders and act as if none of it really matters.

Time to put the body on the pyre. Isaac refuses to touch it on the grounds that he’s decided this whole idea is totally sick. So Nycette and Daniel hoist the corpse between them. They look queasy wrapping their fingers around the clammy, bloated limbs. The fresh air has accelerated the decomposition process. The body has pickled and the skin has started to suppurate. The mottled flesh is inhuman. They awkwardly swing the corpse back-and-forth to gain momentum. They toss it atop the fire.

It rolls off. The body lies face-down on the ground. Daniel and Nycette pick it up again, trying not to seem distressed. They get a firmer purchase on the arms and legs. Choose a better angle of approach. Pitch the body with more force. But it takes three more tries before the dead girl lies on her back atop the pyre. Her empty face stares up at the blinking stars. Flames conflagrate beneath her body, separated by only a few wooden planks. It’s a breathtaking sight. The girl looks almost majestic. I think that claptrap about the spirit might be true after all.

Then the stench. As the flames blacken the boards and catch the corpse, they unleash a consuming odor. A mixture of the raw and the curdled: Overripe fruit and mold spores; singed hair and meat rot; fresh blood and smeared shit. There’s a perfume-like undercurrent, a sweet tang that’s briny. It’s the sort of smell you can only fully register in the back of your throat as you start to gag. I smother my face with my shirt and retreat to the edge of the clearing.

Isaac screams: “Somebody take the body off the fire.” He hops in a mad circle around the flames, trying to leap close to the pyre without getting burned. Panic blurs his features and there’s a horrified glaze to his eyes. “C’est impossible to stop,” Nycette says. “Her spirit is still trapped inside.” And it really is too late. The girl’s body is completely charred. She’s a glowing cinder.

I shimmy up a tree to escape the smell. This is my first funeral. As I watch, part of me wants to obliterate the experience from my memory but part finds it exhilarating. I can’t take my eyes off the blaze. It’s several minutes before I realize what’s missing: None of us are grieving. Daniel grimly stokes the fire, determined to finish the job. Nycette chants a round of basic incantatory stuff, trying to splice into some primeval spiritual current. Isaac curses us all and flees into the woods.

The body ignites. It ruptures into a mass of flames, followed by a sickening pop. “There she goes,” Nycette shouts. The corpse is completely alight, an incandescent effigy, starting to flake off into swirling sheets of gray. The putrid smell continues, lifted by the flames and carried in the smoke toward the firmament. Ash rains down like confetti on Nycette and Daniel. They are coated from head to toe in flecks of burnt skin, but they hardly seem to notice, staring up at the sky, tracing the soul’s journey home, marveling that something up there might be looking back at them. Their upturned faces are beatific and shining.

While Nycette and Daniel are fixed in their private rapture, I leap down from the tree and slip into the woods. I need to be alone. I spend the night curled under a canopy of ferns in a clearing upstream. No matter how many times I tell myself to stop thinking about the girl’s face submerged in the cool blue current, the horrid pop of her body won’t stop echoing in my ears.

In the following days, the other kids in camp avoid Daniel and Nycette. Both their bodies give off a rank and fleshy odor. Even the canines aren’t sure how to deal with the smell; their carrion instincts are scrambled and they can’t decide whether to make a move. Nycette and Daniel are too pleased with themselves to care. They’re often seen together on nightly strolls talking cosmology in the meadow. A pack of dogs always trails a few paces behind, their noses vibrating.

After the cremation, I start thinking it might be time to leave Liberia. The idea appears one morning, like the sticky residue of a forgotten dream. I pull on my damp socks. Swallow a few teeth-pulls of beef jerky. Roll up my hammock with the plastic sheet inside as carefully as if it were a pastry, spend the morning wandering through the muddy ravines of camp, not meeting anyone’s gaze, hands sunk in the pockets of my rotting jeans, feet scuffing the spongy ground, feeling like I’m already half gone. Even my footprints seem lighter.

That afternoon I pack my bag. I know where I’m headed. I scale the chain-link fence and scout the perimeter. Nobody is around. I creep through the empty grounds, careful to avoid the cement janitor’s shed. I run a moss-covered branch along the bars of the cages, soothed by the metallic reverberations. I wonder what the animals remembered of their time here. On a lark, I squeeze inside one of the cages. Sniff the dirt to determine what creature lived here, but there is no tang of musk or finely scented urine. I make myself at home. Pace back and forth. Hop up and down. Swing arms from side to side. Make chattering and hooting noises. But the play-acting seems half-hearted, even to myself.

While I hang upside down from the bars, someone strides past the cage. He doesn’t seem to notice me. I follow at a discreet pace as he heads toward the overgrown arcade where the carnival rides once thrived. Only a few dilapidated husks now remain, their paint faded to a sickly pallor, peeling and infested with scabs of rust. They’re like misshapen boulders deposited by some receding glacier. The boy marches into the ring of dirt where the carousel once sat. He kneels at the center of the circular pit and starts to dig.

Crouched in some scrubby bushes, I can’t see his face. The boy methodically scoops out a small hole with his hands. He slides a bag off his shoulder and removes a yearbook snapshot of a teenage girl flashing a stiff half-smile. He places it in the hole and smothers it with dirt. The boy pulls out a series of small china plates, none larger than a sand dollar. He arranges them in a precise circumference around the hole. The remaining contents of the bag are scavenged scraps of food—half-eaten apple, moldy dinner roll, frayed threads of beef jerky—which he lays on the plates as if setting out a meal.

Entranced by this private ritual, I forget myself and rustle the bushes. The boy wheels around. It’s Isaac. A contorted expression of anger and desperation ripples across his face. For a second, he looks like a colicky baby before it screams. But then his features snap back into blankness. He motions to join him in the carousel pit. I feel weird about interrupting, but he’s insistent.

“My girlfriend killed herself three years ago today,” Isaac says. “She overdosed by swallowing a bottle of pills. Not many people know that.” I give an empathetic nod, as if I can possibly understand. We sit together with our legs crossed Indian-style. My eyes are trained on the white plates, two of which are still missing food. Isaac doesn’t offer any explanations. His fingers knead the lip of a plate, as if trying to conjure sound from the ceramic grooves.

There’s something about this strange and touching offering that makes me realize what I need to do. I start to offer Isaac my condolences about his girlfriend, but instead I blurt out: “I’m leaving Liberia tonight. I’m going to the dead village. To the oracles.”

I expect him to try and talk me out of it, but instead he offers a weary smile. He sets about completing his ritual, taking the last gnarled strands of beef jerky and positioning them on the empty plates. As he surveys the circle of food, his expression oscillates between anxiety and melancholy. I dig inside my knapsack for the filthy plastic bag filled with crushed blackberries. My favorite meal. “I’d like to add something,” I say.

“You’ll need those for your trip.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “I want to.” I’m not sure why but I know it’s important to make a contribution. With an appropriate sense of ceremony, I kneel next to the china plate that holds only a half-gnawed crab apple and slowly shake the berries from the bag. They form a soggy black pyramid and spill over the plate, which is soon encircled in a pool of purple juice. “For your girlfriend,” I say.

Before Isaac can respond, we hear crackling sounds and hushed twitters from the bushes and trees. The leaves shudder. Fleetingly familiar shapes dart through the foliage. Isaac stares into the underbrush, gradually working his gaze round the perimeter. “They’re here,” he says. “We’d better go now.”

Without seeing them, I can feel their presence. The small faces, hairy paws, arched tails. “They’re real,” I say.

“Quiet,” Isaac says. “Back away slowly. Don’t spook them.” We take a series of deliberate and measured steps toward the entrance of the midway, as if this too is part of the ritual. The whistling whoops and belly growls begin to escalate. A shiver ripples through my body. I imagine a mass of furry backs hunched in the shadows, anxious for us to leave so they can swarm the plates and devour their offering. We keep walking with our gazes trained on the ground, but I can tell we’re encircled by countless pairs of tremulous golden eyes.

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