* * *
Fourth grade, fifth grade, the end of the war. Vacationers trickle up from lower elevations to sail across the lake in boats that seem to Zeno full of happy families: moms, dads, kids. The city puts Papa’s name on a downtown memorial and someone hands Zeno a flag and someone else says heroes this, heroes that, and afterward, at supper, Pastor White sits at the head of Mrs. Boydstun’s table and waves a turkey leg.
“Alma, Alma, what do you call a queer boxer?”
Mrs. Boydstun stops mid-chew, parsley flecking her teeth.
“Fruit punch!”
She cackles; Pastor White grins into the mouth of his drink. On the shelves around them two hundred plump porcelain children watch Zeno with wide-open eyes.
* * *
He’s twelve when the Cunningham twins call him to the circulation desk and hand across a book: The Mermen of Atlantis, eighty-eight four-color pages. “Ordered this with you in mind,” the first sister says and the skin around her eyes crinkles, and the second sister stamps the due date in the back and Zeno carries the book home and sits on the little brass bed. On page one a princess is abducted off a beach by strange men in bronze armor. When she wakes, she finds herself imprisoned in an underwater city beneath a great glass dome. Under their bronze armor the men of the city are web-toed creatures in golden armbands with pointy ears and gill slits on their throats, and they have thick triceps and powerful legs and bulges at the intersections of their thighs that start a buzzing in Zeno’s gut.
The strange, beautiful men breathe underwater; they are deeply industrious; their city sports delicate towers made of crystal and high-arched bridges and long lustrous submarines. Bubbles rise past shafts of golden, watery light. By page ten, a war has begun between the underwater men and the clumsy above-water men, who have come to reclaim their princess, and the above-water men fight with harpoons and muskets while the underwater men fight with tridents, and their muscles are long and fine, and Zeno, heat spreading through his body, cannot keep his eyes off the little red slashes of gill slits in their throats and their long, muscular limbs. In the final pages the battle increases in ferocity, and just as cracks appear in the dome over the city, endangering everyone, the book says, To Be Continued.
For three days he keeps The Mermen of Atlantis in a drawer, where it glows like something dangerous, pulsing in his mind even when he is at school: radioactive, illegal. Only when he’s sure Mrs. Boydstun is asleep and the house is utterly quiet does he risk further study: the angry sailors beat against the protective dome with their harpoons; the elegant underwater warriors swim about in their burgundy robes with their tridents and ropy thighs. In dreams they tap at his bedroom window, but when he opens his mouth to speak, water rushes in, and he wakes with a feeling like he has fallen through the lake ice.
Ordered this with you in mind.
On the fourth night, hands shaking, Zeno carries The Mermen of Atlantis down the creaking stairs, past the mulberry curtains and lace runners and the kettle of potpourri pumping out its nauseating perfume, slides open the fireplace screen, and shoves the book in.
* * *
Shame, fragility, fear—he’s the opposite of his father. He seldom ventures downtown, takes pains to avoid walking past the library. If he glimpses one of the Cunningham sisters by the lake or in a store, he about-faces, ducks, hides. They know he has not returned the book, that he has destroyed public property: they will guess why.
In the mirror his legs are too short, his chin too weak; his feet embarrass him. Maybe in some distant, glittering city, he would belong. Maybe in one of those places, he could emerge, bright and new, as the man he wishes he could become.
Some days, walking to school, or simply rising from bed, he is knocked off-balance by a sudden, stomach-churning sense of spectators ringed around him, their shirts soaked in blood and accusation on their faces. Pansy, they say, and level their outstretched fingers at him. Sissy. Fruit Punch.
* * *
Zeno is sixteen and apprenticing part-time in the machine shop at Ansley Tie and Lumber when seventy-five thousand soldiers in the North Korean People’s Army cross the 38th parallel and start the Korean War. By August the churchmen who gather around Mrs. Boydstun’s table on Sunday afternoons are complaining about the shortcomings of the new generation of American soldiers, how they’ve become pampered, made weak by an overindulgent culture, infected with give-up-itis, and the lit ends of their cigarettes draw orange circles above the chicken.
“Not brave like your daddy,” Pastor White says, and makes a show of slapping Zeno’s shoulder, and somewhere in the distance Zeno hears a door slide open.