If Rex was killed, did he die alone? Did he murmur to Zeno in the night as the truck rumbled away, assuming that he was in the barrel next to his? Or did he expect Zeno to fail him all along?
* * *
In June, three weeks after Rex’s disappearance, guards march Zeno and Blewitt and eighteen other of the youngest prisoners into the yard and an interpreter tells them they are being released. At a checkpoint two American MPs with shiny cheeks check Zeno’s name on a roster; one hands him a manila card that reads OK CHOW. There’s an ambulance ride across the demarcation line and then he’s brought to a delousing tent where a sergeant sprays him head-to-toe with DDT.
The Red Cross gives him a safety razor, a tube of shaving cream, a glass of milk, and a hamburger. The bun is extraordinarily white. The meat glistens in a way that does not look real. It smells real, but Zeno is certain that it is a trick.
* * *
He returns to the United States on the same ship that took him to Korea two and a half years before. He is nineteen years old and weighs 109 pounds. On each of the eleven days he is on board he is interviewed.
“Give six examples of how you tried to sabotage the Chinese effort.” “Who got better treatment than anyone else?” “Why was so-and-so given cigarettes?” “Did you ever feel any attraction to the communist ideology?” He hears that the Black soldiers have it worse.
At one point an army psychiatrist hands him a Life magazine opened to a photo of a woman in a bra and panties. “How does this make you feel?”
“Fine.” He hands the magazine back. Fatigue rolls through him.
He approaches every debriefing officer he can about a British lance corporal named Rex Browning, last seen at Camp Five in May, but they say, we’re not Royal Marines, we’re the United States Army, we have enough men to keep track of. At the docks in New York there are no brass bands, no flashbulbs, no weeping families. On a bus outside of Buffalo, he begins to cry. Towns flash by, followed by long stretches of dark. Six floodlit signs, each twenty feet apart, wink past:
THE WOLF
IS SHAVED
SO NEAT AND TRIM
RED RIDING HOOD
IS CHASING HIM
BURMA-SHAVE
Seymour
Mr. Bates, the sixth-grade teacher, has a dyed mustache, a blazing, godlike temper, and zero interest in his students wearing ear defenders during class. Every morning, to start the day, he switches on his This-Is-Very-Expensive-So-You-Kids-Better-Not-Touch-It ViewSonic projector and shows videos of current events on the whiteboard. The class sits, uncombed and yawning, while at the front of the room landslides smash Kashmiri villages.
Every day Patti Goss-Simpson brings four fish sticks to school in her Titan Deep Freeze lunch box and every day at 11:52 a.m., because the cafeteria is being remodeled, Patti puts her terrible fish sticks in the terrible microwave at the back of Mr. Bates’s room and presses the terrible beepy buttons and the smell that pours out feels to Seymour like he’s being pressed face-first into a swamp.
He sits as far from Patti as he can, plugs his nose and ears, and tries to daydream Trustyfriend’s forest back into existence: lichen hanging from branches, snow slipping from bough to bough, the teeming settlements of the NeedleMen. But one morning in late September, Patti Goss-Simpson tells Mr. Bates that Seymour’s behavior toward her at lunch hurts her feelings, so Mr. Bates mandates that Seymour eat beside her at the center table, right beside the projector stand.
11:52 a.m. arrives. In go the fish sticks. Beep boop beep.
Even with his eyes closed Seymour can hear the fish sticks rotating, can hear Patti snap open the microwave door, can hear the fish flesh sizzling on her little plate as she sits back down. Mr. Bates sits behind his desk chomping baby carrots and watching mixed martial arts highlights on his smartphone. Seymour hunches over his lunch box trying to plug his nose and cover his ears at the same time. Not worth eating today.
He is counting to one hundred in his head, eyes closed, when Patti Goss-Simpson reaches and taps him with a fish stick on his left ear. He jerks backward; Patti grins; Mr. Bates misses the whole thing. Patti squints her left eye and points the fish stick at him like a gun.
“Pow,” she says. “Pow. Pow.”
Somewhere inside Seymour a final defense crumbles. The roar, which has chewed at the edges of every waking minute since he found Trustyfriend’s wing, blitzkriegs the school. It swarms over the ridge above the football field, mashing everything in its path.
Mr. Bates dips a carrot into hummus. David Best belches; Wesley Ohman cracks up; the roar explodes across the parking lot. Locusts hornets chain saws grenades fighter jets screaming screeching fury rage. Patti bites off the barrel of her fish stick gun as the walls of the school splinter. The door of Mr. Bates’s room flies away. Seymour puts both hands on the projector cart and pushes.