It’s a fat cylinder, painted gray, brown, and white, and looks as if it has wings pressed to its sides and talons on its feet. Big yellow eyes glow in the center of its face and it wears a little bow tie: a great grey.
Across the door it says, PLEASE RETURN BOOKS HERE. On its breast:
LAKEPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY
“OWL” YOU NEED ARE BOOKS!
The front door of the library opens and Marian bustles out with her bag and keys wearing a cherry-red parka and her buttons are done up wrong and her expression is hurt or angry or annoyed or all three.
“You missed the dedication. I asked everybody to wait.”
“I—”
“I reminded you twice, Seymour.” The painted owl seems to fix accusatory eyes on him as Marian tugs up her collar. “You know,” she says, “you’re not the only person in the world,” and gets in her Subaru and drives away.
* * *
April is warmer than it should be. He stops going to the library, skips Environmental Awareness Club meetings, dodges Mrs. Tweedy in the halls. After school he sits on a low wall behind the ice rink, in Wi-Fi range, and chases Bishop’s videos into ever shadier corners of the internet. Humans are best understood as exterminators, he says. Every habitat we enter, we decimate, and now we have overrun the earth. The next thing we exterminate will be ourselves.
One for the toilet, one for the sink—Seymour stops taking the buspirone. For several days his body crashes. Then it wakes up. Sensations roar back; his mind feels as if it becomes the huge, curved mirror of a radar telescope, gathering light from the farthest corners of the universe. Every time he steps outside, he can hear the clouds grinding through the sky.
“How come,” Janet asks one day as she drives him home, “you never want to meet my parents?”
A dump truck rumbles past. Out there Bishop’s warriors are gathering. Seymour feels as though he is preparing for a metamorphosis; he can almost feel himself breaking down at the molecular level, building himself into an entirely new thing.
Janet pulls up in front of the double-wide. He balls his hands into fists.
“I’m talking,” she says, “but you’re not listening. What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing’s going on with me.”
“Just get out of the car, Seymour.”
* * *
They call us militants and terrorists. They argue that change takes time. But there is no time. We can no longer live in a world culture where the rich are allowed to believe that their way of life has no consequences, that they can use whatever they want and throw away whatever they want, that they are immune to catastrophe. I know that it’s not easy to have your eyes opened. It’s not fun. We will all have to be strong. The coming events will test us in ways we cannot yet imagine.
The link flashes Join Us Join Us Join Us.
* * *
He studies the Eden’s Gate townhomes closest to the double-wide, looking for the ones with no signs of life, whose owners are clearly somewhere else, and on the fifteenth of May, while Bunny is working a dinner shift at the Pig N’ Pancake, he crosses the backyard past the egg-shaped boulder and hops the ranch-rail fence and scurries through the shadows trying various windows. When he finds one that is unlocked, he climbs through the blinds and stands in the dimness.
The oven clock sends a soft green glow through the kitchen.
The modem is in the hall closet. The network name and password are taped to the wall. For a few breaths he stands in someone else’s life: a magnet on the refrigerator reads Beer: The Reason I Wake Up Every Afternoon; a framed family photo on the sideboard; the lingering odors of coffee and last weekend’s Crock-Pot; an empty dog bowl by the pantry. Four ski helmets hang on hooks by the front door.
In the grocery store, people push carts full of brightly packaged food, none of them realizing they stand beneath the towering wall of a dam about to give way. A boxed cake studded with blue and yellow frosting-stars that says Congratulations, Sue is seventy-five percent off. He keeps his ear defenders on in the checkout line.
When Bunny gets home she pulls off her shoes and says, “What’s this?”
Seymour sets two pieces of cake on plates and carries over the blue Ilium smart speaker. Bunny looks at him. “I thought—”
“Try it.”
She leans over the capsule. “Hello?”
A little green light draws a circle around the rim. Hello. It sounds vaguely British. I’m Maxwell. What’s your name?
Bunny claps her hands to her cheeks. “I’m Bunny.”
Lovely to meet you, Bunny. Happy birthday. What may I do for you this evening?