Arcadia

Heliopolis

So lovely, the goosefleshed girls in suits gone flabby, the girls with lips rimmed in blue. Queen of all is Helle. She has been away with Astrid since winter began, returning a week ago to dazzle. She sits, bone white, on the boulder by the edge of the Pond. She is dreadlocked, nose-studded, her elbows puckered with cold. She is so pale Bit can hardly look at her.

The Pond roars with voices; it hurts Bit’s ears. An early day in May, and freezing, but the kidlets and Ados of Arcadia have come here to soak up the chill sun. What had once seemed to Bit an impossible stretch of water has shrunk with two hundred thrashing bodies in it. He swims to the center of the Pond and goes under. The boys whiten the surface; the girls’ feet dangle off the boulders, small, skimming things. He goes deeper, to the bottom, where the young weeds are nubbins under his feet and the cold clutches at him.

There is peace in this deep. He is free from the layered tensions of Arcadia, the overcrowding, the hunger. But up where the surface meets the sky, a speck becomes an open hand, becomes a star slowly falling toward him. A pulse in his gut when he sees that it is Helle, her eyes open to search for him. Her feet, landing, send shivers of mud to his knees. She reaches toward Bit, touches his side. Bad Helle, she tickles him.

He has to race the silvery swim of his lost air to the surface. There, he gasps and chokes, tears starting to his eyes. Helle comes up, laughing. Her dreadlocks float around her head, weeds themselves.

You’re avoiding me, Bit, she says, her mouth half underwater.

No, he says but can’t look her full in the face. He isn’t avoiding her; he just can’t see the old Helle under the new gloss and glamour of the Outside in her.

She says, no longer laughing, Look at me. It’s just me, Bit.

The other girls are swimming toward them, their heads like a flock of pale ducks over the water. Before they reach Helle, he does look at her. For this one moment, he sees the old Helle, that vulnerable girl more lost, more watchful than even he had been.

At last, the kidlets have turned blue and fled, and only the toughest remain, twelve adolescents — Ados — every one of them Old Arcadia. His best friends shiver in the drizzle next to Bit. Ike, lanky and shining with the same white light as his sister; Cole and Dyllie, with Sweetie’s beautiful face, in shades of pink and brown. They sit together, feigning ease, listening to Helle, who was never known for grand storytelling, fill them in about the Outside: Everyone’s fat and smells like chemicals. They wear stupid buttons all over their jackets and all they talk about is the World’s Fair.

All at once, it seems, his friends are straining to listen. Then he hears, too, and knows that he has been hearing the beat for some time, under the birds, under the wind, under the leaves moving in the trees. Helicopters. Bursting over the treetops, glossy black and taloned, flying low. Bit can see the pilots in earmuffs and the grim men in the doors holding machine guns.

The wind from the blades tosses water in their eyes, sends rocks against their skin. The choppers pass, and the Pond sloshes against the shore. Bit leaps up and races his friends toward Arcadia House, easily outstripping the rest over the mud paths worn into the lawn, though Cole, too, is fast. People clump in the doorways of the Soy Dairy, the Bakery, the Eatery; heads mushroom from the windows and shyly withdraw. A herd of Trippies scatters, leaving their Minders behind. People pour around the Terraces, massing in the circular drive, and Bit hurtles through the sunburnt bodies, pitchforks and shovels, mudded feet and bodily stink and screaming kidlets, the babies wailing from their slings, practically the whole crowded nine hundred Arcadians having left their scattered pursuits to gather here. Bit scans, panicking, for Hannah. When he finds her — hair in twinned crowns around her head, plumper now because of the pills, frowning up at the sky — he is washed with relief. Her apron is smeared with soy; he takes her hand and puts himself between her and the machines. But she is shouting Abe in his ear, and here it is again, the sharp stone in Bit, his guilt; Abe always an afterthought. Bit scans until he sees his father in his wheelchair, on the Arcadia House porch. The thin pale legs in the shorts, the streaky beard. Abe is trapped up on the rain-slick hill. Without Hannah, he would have stayed there. Bit sprints up the Terraces. His father pats his shoulder, says, Good boy, steer me down.

Bit can barely hang on to the wheelchair as they slide on the thin path beside the stairs, his puny hundred pounds no match for Abe’s mass and acceleration, chill mud splattering over Bit’s bare chest and face.

The helicopters vanish over the forest to the north, though they are still loud. Above the noise, Handy is roaring. He has gone half bald since the troubles began and hides his vaster forehead behind a folded bandanna. He stands like an orator on the terrace to address them.

. . they’re looking for a reason to shut us down, he’s shouting, and we’re so stupid we’re giving it to them. Old bastard Reagan and his war on drugs are fucking here, guys. So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to go pull up that fucking weed and burn it. Now, now, now.

Peaceful Handy, Buddha Handy, furious, his face purple. The charge to the air is electric. Bit finds that he has stepped behind his father’s chair.

But Abe’s shoulder is knotted and shaking under Bit’s hand. His voice rises, and as it does, the world seems to constrict. Fuck, Handy, no consensus? he shouts. No Council of Nine? Just handing out the diktats, yeah?

Handy searches out Abe, and when he finds him, he takes off his glasses and carefully polishes them on the hem of his teeshirt. His movements are slow and deliberate, and in the space he opens with his silence, people begin to murmur, to call to one another. But when Handy puts his glasses on again, it is as if he has miraculously peeled the anger from his skin. His body has softened, his hands have unclenched, his face spreads out in its old magnetic smile, only a gray eyetooth these days to mar it. The change in the bodies around Bit is swift. He can feel the crowd relaxing, the energy unknotting, shifting out toward Handy.

Fine, old buddy, Handy says in his concert-loud voice. You’re right. Soon as the Council of Nine was voted in, I got left to do the more spiritual guiding. But, listen, I got a personal stake in all this. When Titus’s dad sold us this place for a buck, it was my name they put on the deed. Martin “Handy” Friis, that gorgeous Norwegian surname Astrid gave me when we were hitched. Deed’s in the Library, go look it up. So, you know, they’re not going to arrest all nine hundred beatniks, they’ll be arresting me. And, if you’ll remember, I’ve already done time for you all.

He looks from one face to the next. When his glance falls on Abe again, measuring how his words are going over, Bit feels hollow with collective guilt. Five years earlier, the Feds had found a cottage industry of shrooms out of Arcadia and arrested Handy. It was only Harold with his Harvard Law degree who had gotten Handy out.

Let me tell you, Handy says. Even seven months in the hooch is no cakewalk. And so, I respectfully beg of you, beautiful Free People, to do me a solid and go out with me into the woods, and pull up all the hemp that we got growing out there, though it may hurt your souls to see all that good stuff go to waste. Consider it a way to save your old spiritual teacher a shiv in the ribs.

He has won them all over again. It is always so easy for Handy; there is a switch inside him that he can flick on and off. Arcadia laughs. Loudest of all are the Newbies, thrilled to get a glimpse of the legendary Handy, so rarely seen these days. Surrounding him are the old stalwarts, still in love with him, and, closer still, his family. Lila and Hiero chuckle beside Fiona, a woman now, her head against Handy’s legs. Ike is puffed with pride. Leif, alien-blank, stands with the Circenses Singers, Erik is away at college. Only Helle sits gravely on the stone terrace wall, looking up at her father, her face still, her long pale mouth a line.

Wrapped again in Arcadia’s adoration, Handy begins to organize the pull and burn.

Abe spins a wheel to face Bit and Hannah. In a tight voice he says, Stone Family meeting. Now.

In Abe and Hannah’s room on the first floor of Arcadia House, Hannah shuts the window. The Tutorials have resumed in the courtyard: little Peter is repeating something in Hebrew to his tutor, Theo, five feet away. Theo seems harmless, but it is hard to know these days who is on whose side. In the swelter of the close, dim room, the stink of Arcadia House rises to them: sweat, onion, jizz, cheap incense.

Oh, dear, Hannah says. Eau de three hundred bodies.

Bit laughs, but Abe says, We don’t have time for jokes. Hannah raises an eyebrow and opens an orange from the nightstand, a treat saved from dinner a few days ago. The spritz from the skin is immediate relief.

What’s going on? Bit says. He bites a hangnail, calming with the taste of blood.

His parents look at him. Handsome Abe, Hannah golden with her early tan. We should keep him out of it, Abe, she says. He’s still a kid, he just turned fourteen last week. She takes Bit’s hand from his mouth, kisses it, and holds it to keep him from chewing. Her fingers have acid from the orange still on them, and he is glad for the sting.

We need him, Hannah, Abe says. And it’s not as if I haven’t smelled it already on his breath.

Hannah sighs and her hand tightens around Bit’s, and it is all he can do to prevent himself from crawling into her lap.

Please, Bit says, just tell me.

Abe says, Sorry to have to bring you into all of this, but Handy’s minions are out there destroying our next year of groceries. Back in the winter, some of us in the Biz Unit decided to invest in some high-grade marijuana seeds, ready for Cockaigne Day in July. Arcadians who left have agreed to sell to the Outside for us. The Great Pot Plot, we call it.

Bit says nothing, but his disappointment in his parents wings itself, a trapped bird, around the room.

Listen, Hannah says. We know it’s wrong.

Well, Abe says. Debatable. It’s just not legal.

We had to weigh evils, Hannah says. We would never do it if we weren’t so poor. We owe for seed for two years. And there are all the new fucking projects that Handy greenlighted, Astrid’s Midwifery School down at the satellite in Tennessee, the stupid Circenses tour. I mean, Jesus, Handy, put your own house in order first. We owe too much. We’ll starve if we don’t do this, she says, and Hannah’s callused hands clutch the sheet she’s sitting on.

Bit frowns. What about the Motor Pool? The ceramics? What about Monkeypower? All the food we produce? There has to be some other way.

None of those make nearly enough, Hannah says. Plus with the Trippies and the Hens and all those fucking runaways, we have too many mouths to feed. We had no choice. I’d rather risk jail time than let our babies starve.

Amen to that, Abe says, and there is a look between his parents that makes Bit thrill with embarrassment. Sex is a tornado that suddenly smashed him a year ago. It is a whistle too high for human ears, and he awoke one morning a dog. He finds it everywhere, especially where it dismays him: in the bulging, dripping cheesecloths in the Soy Dairy, enormous mammaries; in the slide of a pitchfork through compost like the half-nasty mechanism of intercourse. It is here, in his father’s flush as he looks at Hannah, her own face lit up with certainty.

We need you right now, Little Bit, Abe says. Your mom and I decided to keep the biggest crop a secret from Titus and Saucy Sally and Hank and Horse. For exactly what happened today.

Even fucking Titus, Hannah says bitterly, and Bit remembers, just after the helicopters, Titus’s face cracking open in its old hopeful beam as he watched Handy speaking.

But, Bit says, I’m just a kid.

You’re a kid who can run, Abe says. Bit tries not to look at his father’s legs and fails; the familiar guilt, sickly, greasy, is heaped on guilt. But Abe is still speaking:. . get there first and do anything to keep them from finding the plot. Pretend to be coming back from there, saying that you looked and there was nothing. Make a wild moose call or something. Smack them over the head with a rock.

No violence, Hannah says.

There is a shuffling in the hallway, and they stop to listen until whoever it is moves on. Honey, Bit, I can’t force you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with, she whispers. If you say no, I’ll get out there as fast as I can, but I don’t know the secret paths through the woods like you. You’re so fast and quiet. But you have to know about the consequences of getting involved. We could go to jail or get shamed out of Arcadia if we’re caught. It’s your choice. We’ll always love you, no matter what you decide. We respect what your conscience tells you to do.

Her voice, though: the tightness in it. It just kills him. All right, he says.

Abe exhales. All right, he says. It’s the little island in the stream north of Verda’s. She knows all about the Pot Plot, she sympathizes. Go as fast as you can off the path, and when Hannah can hike out there, she’ll take over the watch from you. Ready?

Bit thinks, No.

He says, Ready.

Run, Abe says.

Bit runs. The smoke of the bonfire in the Sheep’s Meadow is already strong. They must have pulled up a patch already. He is beyond the tents that have spread in the past year into the woods, for the people who can’t find cots in the separate encampments; he is beyond the smell of the fields, the loos, the compost heaps. He can hear people crashing through the forest, clumsy ogres. Bit knows the deer paths. He goes, invisibly, beyond where they are. Past the noise, the old watchful silence of the woods presses in on him: he settles into his legs and lets the trees whip by. He startles a crane from a pool, sends the white tails of deer bounding over logs. Miles later he slows and sees the island turtling out of the stream. Only when he has waded through the hip-deep water and has come a few steps in does he see the plot, cleverly hidden on the eastern side of the trees. The helicopters, Hannah had known, would come from the navy base in the west or the army base to the south.

When Bit’s heart has stopped its pounding, he washes the dried mud from his chest and shoulders, finds a bucket tied to a tree, and makes himself useful, watering.

He hides again in a cold pit in the willows and looks back toward Arcadia. He sees nothing, hears nothing but the ordinary sounds of the woods settling after his disturbance. A contrail puffs fat overhead. A muskrat draws two slender lines in the water. After some time he swivels his head and looks toward Verda’s cottage sending up its thin stream of smoke.

He has known Verda forever, since he was six. Before he knew these miles of woods like his own small body, he would get lost on his wanders. He met the old woman one night when he was in a snowstorm and dark was falling fast. He had lost a red mitten, and he put both his hands in the remaining one and held it in front of him as if it were a lantern to light his way. But the forest was avid: it wanted, that night, to eat him. Through spindrift he had trudged, through black. At last, he had smelled salvation in woodsmoke and followed it to a stone cottage squatting at the edge of a field. He knocked and knocked. The door fell open to the witch he’d first seen in the dark woods the spring before, the strange dog at her side that Bit had thought was a tamed white doe. Bit had been too tired and too cold to feel fear, until his wet clothes were off and there was a blanket on him, smelling of sun and lavender. Then the witch leaned into her woodstove and the light caught and underlined her sharp nose, her wrinkles, her lank hair, and some spark of a story alit in his head and Bit began to scream. From the hearth, the white beastie watched him, panting in the heat. The witch let Bit scream until he lost his voice, and when he did, she handed him a bowl of soup. It was venison, the first meat he had ever eaten. It tasted like death. He threw it up. He found himself in a truck, and Titus came to the Gatehouse door, Saucy Sally and the baby in the lanternlight behind him. Titus began to cry with relief: Oh, Bit, you’re found, he said, gathering him up in his great heavy arms. We thought you were froze to death. Bit looked back into the night, and the witch put her thumb on his chin. Little Ridley, she said softly. Come back and see your Verda sometime; and she disappeared from the dream he’d thought he was in.

Now he tries to send Verda brainwaves to bring a handful of shortbread and a blanket, but she doesn’t hear or heed his silent calls. He tries not to think of what would happen to him in a jail-type situation. He is so small still; he looks far younger than he is. He has heard bad stories of juvenile hall, filtered up from the runaways, and his mind shies away from ideas of violence and nasty food and never seeing his parents again. In the sky blazes Venus, a calm blue, and Bit thinks of last year’s syzygy, the alignment of planets, how Ollie was so convinced of apocalypse that he spent March in the reinforced tunnel between Arcadia House and the Octagonal Barn. When the anxiety gets to Bit, he rolls a green leaf into a little cigarette and lights it with the matches all Old Arcadia kids keep in plastic bags in their pockets, with Swiss Army knives and some gorp. When he’s calmer, he laughs quietly to himself and startles a chipmunk into a tree.

In the shadows of the trees, it grows cold. Bit’s cutoff jeans have dried on his legs, and he has to clutch his limbs to his torso to keep from shivering. Dusk thickens. The forest breathes in a way he can’t hear when he is amid the clamor of Arcadia. On the path a few hundred yards away there is a rustling, the distinct sound of human steps, and he stands, a rock absurdly heavy in his fist. But it is Hannah. She’s wearing the same ripped-sleeve flannel shirt and cutoff shorts as before but now has a knapsack on her back and her work boots on her feet, as if she were off for an innocent hike.

She presses a finger to her lips and wades across the stream. When she hugs Bit, she must feel how cold his skin is, and she takes off her shirt, baring her bra to the air. She drapes the shirt on him. It holds the warmth of her body in the weave, her bready smell. You’re the best, Little Bit, she whispers. Lila and Hiero weren’t too far away from me on the path, so be careful.

He carries the weight of her hug, a ghost of Hannah, on the run back home. He comes out into the Sheep’s Meadow in the pale twilight just as the gong begins to ring, calling the first shift of Arcadians, the most fragile, the Hens and Trippies and kidlets, to their supper.

Bit wakes, pulsing with dread. From his top bunk, Cole’s hand reaches out and pats him on the chest. Just sheep, Bit’s friend mutters, you’re okay.

Baa baa, murmurs Ike, still asleep in his own bunk.

Bit concentrates on ujjayi breath to calm himself, imagining the windmill in the back of his throat. The same nightmare has circled in Bit since he was little and Handy put actual sheep in the Sheep’s Meadow: not to exploit, he explained, they’re not pets and they won’t be eaten, but for their wool, which they gladly gave and which the Arcadians could sell. The kidlets loved the sheep; the women dreamed of woolen sweaters, lanolin on their chapped hands. Then Tarzan, who appointed himself shepherd, came down dizzy, with great open sores, and Astrid came speeding back from the hospital in Syracuse where the AmbUnit had rushed him, her hair wild, her face frantic. For hours, Abe and Handy and the midwives and Titus, the people who wore power in Arcadia then, conferred. That night, Bit woke to an unfamiliar stink. He crept out of the Children’s Dormitory to follow the acrid smoke. He found a grim group of three in the meadow around a bonfire. When he came closer the fire turned gruesome, the bodies of the sheep in a ziggurat within the flames. Bit watched a lamb’s eyeballs explode. He sat in the darkness, struck frozen until Astrid, who stood apart from Hank and Horse, brought a hand up to push her hair from her face, and her arms were blackened to the elbows with blood.

When a certain pressure builds in Arcadia — overcrowding, not enough food, the strange hidden undercurrents that make the adults’ faces pinch — the sheep come back to Bit’s dreams; sheep springing through the dark like live torches, the stench of burning fat. Over and over they leap until, at once, the creatures turn toward Bit. They crowd him, open their muzzles, almost say something. He knows it is something he couldn’t bear to hear, and he wakes almost screaming.

For hours, he waits for sleep. Shortly before dawn, he gives up. When he rises, he listens for his friends’ breath to stir. They sleep on. He opens the window to air out the room, the awful dead creatures that are Ike’s feet, the mixed adolescent body stink. He carefully dresses in his shirt and jeans. His broken sneakers mouth open when he walks, toes lapping the air like tongues.

Through the Ado Unit Common Room, through the hallways, plaster gapping and lath exposed, down the smooth polished banister for silence. Through the Library, heaped with Whole Earth Catalogs, old New Yorkers, silverfished books dug up from the basement where the first inhabitants had stashed them: American Eclectic, Walden, News from Nowhere. Also Carlos Castaneda, Julia Kristeva, Herman Wouk, paperbacks scavenged from Dumpsters or bought for a nickel. He slips through the Eatery, redolent of last night’s enchiladas. It is early for the Breakfast Shift, who will soon clang pans and stir yeast and soy into scrambled yegg and wash the apples, wormy but good. All is still and nobody is awake but Bit.

Out in the black, he runs down the slate steps by touch alone. The encampments across Arcadia are dark, only a few bobbing lights from afar, the flashlights of people rising for the loo. From the Bakery, a rich bread smell rises. His skin prickles with cold; dew flings from his heels to his back. There is a sharp edge to the sky, pine tanging the air, stones scattering like live creatures under his step. He runs as fast as his legs can take him, very fast for a body small as his, then slows to enjoy the darkness softening in the woods.

A cardinal flushes from a bush, but he has forgotten his new camera that his grandmother has sent him. He thinks of returning, but the run back is so far, and daybreak won’t wait for him.

One breath before dawn, he climbs the hill.

At the top, in a cluster of sweet William above the pines, he sits to watch day begin to hatch its yellow. A hawk stretches its wings and swirls as it rises. The fog rolls from the ground like a blanket and swiftly covers the distant mountains, the fields, the Pond, the streams; covers Amos the Amish’s far-off barn, the thin lace that is Verda’s smoke. A hungry creature, the fog; it gobbles. It climbs up the Terraces with the crooked apple trees. At last, only Bit and Arcadia House sit turned toward each other, each alone on a hill, above the fog’s milky sea. Two islands, they are, brightening in the dawn.

The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spin into nothing. Beyond Arcadia hulk the things he has dreamed of: museums, steel towers, pools, zoos, theaters, oceans full of strange creatures.

He knows that his understanding of the Outside is imprecise, both gleaned and muted. It is whatever makes its way to his ears, the stories people bring with them, what he has read. He has never been away from Arcadia since the Free People arrived when he was a toddler, not unless he counts Verda’s cottage at the edge of the forest, a tiny atoll of one. There have been times he’s been offered a ride to Summerton by the Motor Pool, or the chance to go with Hannah to visit the university library in Syracuse, but every time he has said no thank you. He is frightened of the Outside: either that it will be all that he imagines or that it won’t be.

Claus, a Circenses Singer, delights in asking Bit questions fit for babies: How big is an elephant? What does a subway look like? How many people can Yankee Stadium hold? Bit can understand only vaguely why Claus laughs until tears roll down his cheeks when Bit answers: An elephant is as big as the Octagonal Barn? A subway is like a train of Volkswagen Beetles in a big steel tube? Yankee Stadium can hold. . two thousand people? twice the size of Arcadia, and the limit of how large he can picture a crowd.

You kids, Claus says, sighing back into his chair, wiping his face. You’re like some crazy jungle tribe with bones in your noses. A sociologist would have a field day with you.

Bit knows this isn’t true. They’re not ignorant or innocent. From the Tutorials he chooses after the State Lessons in the morning, he knows local botany, the classics of English literature, geometry, physics, human physiology. He has assisted with over six birthings down at the Henhouse. He and the other Old Arcadia kids know how to play a guitar, bake and chop wood, pull pots and spin flax, knit their own socks and cultivate grains and vegetables, structure a good story, brew Slap-Apple out of windfall apples, and make anything at all from soy.

He feels no lack. If he concentrates, he can imagine the world in its many forms: the humid density of the jungle; the desert’s clean rasp of sand; the cold clarity of the Arctic. He imagines cities as larger Arcadias, but harder, meaner, people walking around thrusting cash at each other. He has seen the coins like embossed washers, the bits of green paper. Humans out there are grotesque: Scrooges and Jellybys and filthy orphans in the caverns of blacking factories, in lonely depopulated homes, a blight called television like tiny Plato’s caves in every room. It is grimmer in the Outside. There is a war in the Falkland Islands, there are Sandinistas and Contras, there are muggings and rapes, terrible things he has heard the adults talking about, has read about himself when he can find an old wrinkled paper in the Free Store. The president is an actor, placed in power to smoothly deliver the corporations’ lies. There are bombs among the stars and murders in the inner cities, red rain over London, there are kidnappers and slaves even now, even in America.

He has decided that he will leave for college when he is eighteen to study, to learn the magic of pulling images from the darkroom bath. He thinks of Erik at the send-off party, his flabby face radiant with the anticipated glamour of the Outside. Bit will borrow that same glamour for a few years, then come back to Arcadia forever. It will take him every day from now until he leaves to ready himself for what awaits him. He knows his only weapons against the threat of the Outside are knowledge and words: when anxiety bubbles up under his thoughts, he has to say Hannah’s name a hundred times or recite “Desiderata” until the words lose their meanings. If his thoughts skirt close to the forbidden, or he dreams stickily of little Pooh, who is only twelve but with a sweet body and full lips, or if, after his German lessons with Marlene, he runs to the darkroom to relieve the pressure in his pants, he makes amends to Helle in his head. He memorizes poems, and tells them in her direction: She walks in beauty, he thinks. One man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face, he thinks. And even with knowledge and words, he feels sometimes the dark news from Outside could crush him. He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance. This is the most magnificent thing about Arcadia, he knows. It is the shell that protects them.

The wind rises. A rock presses against his sitz bone, and the tide of fog draws off the hill. The first Breakfast Shift will be swarming up to Arcadia House. His face has dried, and the skin pulls taut. He can tamp down the nameless longing that arises in him only by running from the mountain as swiftly as his legs can go.

Bit returns to Arcadia in the full light of morning. He is wrung out. The woods seem deeper in the new light, less benign, like the dark forests in the Grimm book that peopled his childhood with nightmarish creatures. He finds a bush heavy with serviceberries and fills the belly of his teeshirt until he has to take it off and tie it into a sack so he can carry them all.

He can smell Arcadia before he sees or hears it: the loos are being pumped today. The Agri Unit will compost the shit, mix it with straw, and spread it on the fields for manure. The Sanitation Crew is already at work.

In the distance, he hears people shouting, the daily Trippie meeting where all the freaked-out, strung-out, acid-wracked gather to tell their dreams. The hope is that they can be returned to themselves by community and love, though only a few have succeeded. The Trippies arrive every week, an endless stream of the damaged. Each one is given two adult Minders, who keep him safe. Though his conscience pings, Bit is glad he is still too young to work full shifts. He hates minding Trippies, their anger and fear so raw it seems to infect him as well.

Bit walks into the Sheep’s Meadow, the grass verdigris with dew. He puts down his berries and pulls a clump of new clover from the ground and scrubs and scrubs at his face until it feels fresh and the traces of his tears are gone. Goldfinches dart like flying fish from the grass, into the sun, back into the grass troughing and cresting in the wind. At last he feels strong enough to brave the Eatery, the jostle of breakfast. The women will pet him for the berries, he knows. Maybe, even, they will let him take seconds of bread. He cradles the fruit against his bare chest and begins to run again.

He has to go water the Pot Plot. Hannah, busy in the Bakery, had asked him; but before he knows it, he is swept into a work unit. Cole and Ike go off together to the gardens and, with a fluttery feeling in his chest, he wants to tell his best friends to stop, to wait up for him, knowing he can slip out of weeding easily. But Helle has partnered herself with Bit somehow. She is already talking.

. . can’t work outside, she’s saying, and she slides the neck of her teeshirt over her shoulder; he sees her sun-blistered skin. He wants to lay a hand on it, to feel its feverish heat, but just the pressure of the thin shirt is enough to make her wince. She is not wearing a bra. Let’s do a Newbie shift, yeah? she says. In a lower voice, she says, See if I can score some downers.

Oh, he says. He looks at her slantwise, wondering about the drugs. She sees and says, Why do you hate me now, Bit?

I don’t, he says. I mean, I really like you.

I really like you, too, she says, squeezing his forearm. Her bitten fingernails, her cold hands. You’re the only guy here except for my brothers who isn’t always hitting on me.

There is so much he can say to this that he goes quiet. They walk together in silence toward the Gatehouse and Newbieville, that sprawl of canvas out by the County Road. He thinks of the pot plants on their little island drooping, curling at the edges of the leaves, and has to concentrate on the next step on the soft ground, then the next to keep from breaking into a run.

Because, beyond the oppression of his duty, something under his lungs hums with happiness to be walking beside lovely Helle. His attention has sharpened. Every leaf is in clear focus, the weave of the birdsong both intricate and glassy. In the distance, people are bent over the garden. A man carrying water in a bucket to workers is one of the dozen mutton-chopped cats in Arcadia these days who call themselves Wolf. Wolves come and go: Bears and Foxes and Hawks and Falcons and Jackals roam. The women are Rainbows, Sunshines, Summers, Rains, Meadows, Stars. Every day there are new Crows, new Autumns. It is hard to know everybody. At the movies projected some nights on the Octagonal Barn, vivid underwater explorations narrated by a Frenchman or strange, sad black-and-white flicks (piles of bodies in Auschwitz; an eyeball sliced open), Bit will sometimes look up and see clumps of strangers. He will peer around, panicked, to find some familiar face. There are good Newbies who believe in work and poverty and simple food. And there are others, freeloaders, Trippies and Runaways, people hiding out here, diluting the pure beliefs of the Old Arcadians.

Helle says, So many new people. I wish we had some way to weed them. Constructive criticism doesn’t work if you don’t give a shit about the people around you.

In his surprise, Bit dares to look Helle full in the face. She beams at him, Handy’s magnetic smile, and with her tongue clicks the new retainer she finagled from her time in the Outside. It’s a flesh-colored crab in the cavern of her mouth, endlessly fascinating.

How did you know what I was thinking? he says. He hopes she can’t read minds.

We’re alike, she says. You and me. We notice. What you’re thinking is written all over you. Like, yesterday, at the Photography Tutorial, you were looking really hard at this trail of ants. I could see you start to imagine yourself as one of them. Thinking about dismembering a grasshopper, how huge it was to your tiny size, how you would drag it underground, and then about the darkness down below, all the trails and little caverns and halls, and then what it smells like, what it’s like to live in full-body armor. It seems like everybody is so busy that nobody else notices things like that. Except for you.

There is a swimming feeling in Bit, to be read as casually as a paragraph.

They have arrived at Newbieville. Lisa holds a clipboard while Scott takes down the names of the people who have shown up this morning. They are the usual suspects: Trippies with their leathery faces and wild auras, a pregnant mother with two hungry-looking children, a young couple necking on an orange towel. Lisa’s face looks weary; there are blue marks under her eyes.

Here you are, she calls to Bit and Helle, and turns and calls out two names from the board: Armand Hammer and Penelope Connor. One is young, a beefy Runaway with a nail through his infected septum. Every few seconds, he sniffs in what’s oozing from the sore and winces. The other is a Naturist, a sixty-year-old woman with firm breasts and gray streaks in her bush.

Lisa says cheerfully, Congratulations. You have proved to us that you are willing and able to do the work we ask of you and have spent the required month in Newbieville. Now you are welcome to join our Community.

There is sparse applause from the tents and cots. The jittery boy and the old woman stand. They carry their things in cardboard boxes, some clothes, books, a few letters, not much.

Job’s easy today, kids, Lisa says to Bit and Helle. You know what to do.

Welcome to Arcadia, Bit says. Helle repeats it, absentmindedly, scanning the Newbies. She chews the tail of one of her dreadlocks, disappointed with what she sees. Bit takes Penelope’s box from her, and the old woman ruffles his hair. Sweet little guy, she says. When she stretches, he tries very hard not to look at her strangely beautiful chest.

They walk in silence down the hill toward the stream behind Ersatz Arcadia, and Bit has to tell Penelope to watch out for a poison sumac she’s just about to brush: he has a bad image of the tender skin of her buttocks breaking out into white blisters. The closer they come to the Naturist encampment, the more flesh they see, pink and tan and white lines everywhere. By the middle of the lima bean patch, all the bodies bending over to weed are nude.

Two women, very large and pink, very small and grayish, run out of the Quonset and hug Penelope. They take the box from Bit and escort the newest Arcadian inside. Toodles! she calls back at Bit. He wonders how long she’ll last. The Naturists have the highest turnover rate: the winter wind snakes through their Quonset, and its metal is very cold. He thinks maybe he’ll see her again, then doubts it.

On the way back up the hill, Helle says, How come the Naturists are never the people you want to see naked? Bit and Armand Hammer laugh.

The laugh burns away Armand’s shyness, and he says to Helle, I know it’s trite and all, but it’s awesome to be here. I was in a squat in Portland and I saw this one-hour special on Arcadia? And it was, like, heaven. All singing and working in the fields and people free to do what they want, and Handy so eloquent. And the mansion! My parents have a shitty duplex in Pittsburgh. When do you ever get to live in a mansion? Plus, the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen.

He’s ogling Helle openly now, the acne-scarred boy. Bit is surprised how much he wants to punch him in the throat; Bit, who would be broken with a flick of Armand’s wrist.

They stop outside the Runaway Quonset. On a brown-stained mattress three Runaways sit, a fat girl braiding the hair of a boy with the triangular face of a fox, a topless girl with delicate wrists. The topless girl smiles to see Armand gawking at her, and it startles Bit, as it always does, to see perfect teeth in the mouth of a person his age. Many Runaways, mostly suburban kids, had orthodontia, while the kids of the Old Arcadians often have twisted teeth, sometimes set two deep.

Helle says, flatly, Here’s your new home, Armand Hammer. Then she laughs, feeling his ridiculous name leave her mouth.

What’s this? Armand says.

It’s where you stay, Bit says, trying to not enjoy the crumpling of the other boy’s face. I know you were looking forward to Arcadia House, but we’re too crowded. You can try to get a cot in one of the other camps. Singleton Tents, Swingers’ Tents if that’s your thing, Naturists. If you get enough people for a family unit, you can apply for a bus or van from the Motor Pool and park it in Ersatz Arcadia. Then, if the Council approves of you, you can move up to the House when there’s a place.

Yeah, right, says the topless girl. I’ve been here two months and nobody even lets us go anywhere up there but the Eatery.

That’s a lie, Helle says flatly. The topless girl looks her up and down and mutters something that sounds like skinny cunt.

Bit sees Helle expanding the way Astrid expands when she’s angry, and he takes her loosely by the wrist. He says, as calmly as he can, You can use the Library, and you’re supposed to be going up in the mornings for the State Lessons. And you can go to all the lectures and slide shows and concerts you want in the Proscenium or the Octagonal Barn.

But the topless girl rolls onto her belly and says into the mattress, If I wanted to learn things, I’d still be in school.

Whatever, says the fox-faced boy, it’s all bullshit. Handy goes on about equality and subverting the hegemony, but Arcadia’s no different from anywhere else. You all are up on your hill. We’re down here in the mud. I’ve been here for a year and a half. If that’s nonhierarchical, or even fucking respectful, I’ll eat my own ass.

I don’t see you working, you little shit, Helle says. Try working once in a while and maybe you’ll deserve respect.

The boy slowly stands up, and Armand drops his junk on the ground, folding his arms, stepping before him.

But all the fox-boy says is, All right. Okay. Make you a deal. First time I see Handy out busting his ass like the rest of y’all, I’ll be glad to work myself. Until then, I do what he does.

The boy settles back between the plump legs of the girl on the mattress and touches the bare back of the other girl with a long, slow stroke. Both girls giggle.

Helle blanches and strides away.

Bit would like to explain more to Armand, but the other boy is savagely kicking his box of shit into the Runaway Quonset, muttering, I want to live in the mansion, I fucking came here for the mansion. Bit escapes under a volley of catcalls and sneers from the mattress, and catches up to Helle in Ersatz Arcadia.

She is crying, and Bit says, aching for her, Helle. Oh, don’t. They’re not worth it. That guy was an idiot.

Helle passes a forearm over her eyes. She gives a shaky laugh, and the new, harder Helle slides over the old one again. In the face of this complicated girl, Bit feels the straightforward pull of the Pot Plot: there, at least, he knows what he has gotten into, and why.

Yeah, she says. I know. But, she says, a new sour look on her face; what sucks is that he’s also a little right, Bit.

It is hot for a June midafternoon. The scent of Verda’s rosehip tea fills the air; her anise cookies are sweet in his mouth. Beside him, on the rug faded into ashy roses, Eustace, the white dog, snaps at his own privates and looks a question at Bit. Bit rubs Eustace’s head, and the dog sighs back to sleep. Bit frames his mother and Verda in the viewfinder of his camera, their heads on opposite sides of the table, loose wisps sparking with light from the window. Hannah is intent on Verda, who has gone distant, the recorder spinning at her elbow.

They were deeply strange people, she says in her anchorite’s rasp. They called themselves Divinists, because they believed that people could become perfect, therefore divine. They believed that intercourse was a gift from God and had great quantities of it with everyone in the community. To avoid the consequences, namely babies and love, they had a rotational schedule: every night, a new woman with a new man, and the men had to release themselves into their handkerchiefs.

Bit shrivels inside himself a little. Verda looks at him. You will forgive me, Ridley, for my bluntness, she says in her grand and distant way.

She says, But then their leader, John Noland, my great-grandfather, decided it was time to reproduce. He had gone to a Shaker community and saw that they were in danger of dying out, and didn’t wish that upon his people. And so they instituted a program called Eugeniculture. The most spiritual men and the most spiritual young women were allowed to mate, after a very thorough matching. Of course because the most spiritual men were old men, and nobody was more spiritual than John Noland, out of forty-eight babies born, twenty-three were his. One of them was my grandmother Martha Sutton. Her mother, Minerva, was, at the time, a bare thirteen years old.

Verda smiles wearily. One finds that when children are involved in these things, she says, the cracks in the system become clear. Babies that belonged to individual mothers, the claim on the fathers. There was some romantic love going on, verboten of course, and the breeding program interfered with the heart. And, of course, the parents had to watch as their twelve- and thirteen-year-old daughters slept with old men. Word spread to the outside, newspapers had fiery editorials, and John Noland was chased out of Summerton by the townspeople. He fled to Canada. There was nothing binding the community. The center could not hold.

Hannah’s face is shining. Bit clicks another photo of her, and then one of Verda, reflected again and again in the tarnished silver tea set on the table. Verda says, My dear Hannah. I have to stop. I am very tired, and I need to be alone.

Thank you, Hannah says. Her hands are shaking when she lifts her teacup to her lips. Do you have any primary sources, by any chance? Papers, things like that?

Verda says, Loads. She stands and pulls down a hatbox, and when she releases the top, there pours out the smell of sage and tobacco. I’ll give you my great-grandmother’s diary, she says. But that is all for this visit, at least. I’d like for you to return for something, even if it’s just a dusty old book.

She sees Bit gaping into the box and lifts out the dull gleaming thing he is trying to see.

Scrimshaw, she says, putting it in his hands. Walrus tusk. One of John Noland’s sons went out on the high seas and carved the face of his wife over and over again. After a year away, he came back to port and learned that she’d died of yellow fever the day after he’d left.

In wonder, Bit traces the woman’s face, echoed in the bone. It is Helle, to the life.

Please, Verda says now, taking back the scrimshaw and closing up the hatbox. I have a headache bearing down on me. But do return and bring some of your bread. And those leaves to smoke. It helps with my arthritis. Also bring young Master Ridley, who was so bored he took a nap today.

I wasn’t bored, he says. I’m relaxed in your presence.

They grin at one another, and she almost touches him, her claw hovering over his shoulder. You give me hope for the next generation, she says. Not that I believe humankind will last another century. She gives a gruff laugh.

He says, Doom and Gloom Verda.

She says, Off you go to your delinquency. Off you go, Hannah, to write your book.

Something peculiar flits across Hannah’s face, a daring, a desire, and then she tamps it down and says, softly, It’s just a lecture.

Nonsense, Verda says, closing her eyes. And my migraine has arrived. With bassoons and timpanis. Let Eustace out to fend for himself.

They tiptoe out and close the door. Again in the bright expanse of the day, Bit wants to break into a run. But Hannah mutters out of the side of her mouth, Let’s go tend our plot, and Bit is returned to the world of worry. In Verda’s little cottage, the plants out on the island had simmered at the back of his mind, a shadow thought that only sometimes overwhelmed him.

They find the plants huge, almost overgrown: all females, the males plucked out early, all almost twelve feet tall. Bit crouches on the bank, skipping stones until Hannah is finished, and they wade back through the stream to the path. Two more weeks, she says. Then pick and dry and we are on our way. She touches his arm, smiles crookedly. Then you can be a kid again.

He tries to sink himself into identifying the plants at his feet, the jimsonweed someone sowed long ago, the painted trillium, the jack-in-the-pulpit. But when they are halfway home Hannah sees Bit’s face. Oh, kiddo, what’s wrong? she says.

He says, It’s just. I mean, if someone gets in trouble, it may be us, but it may be Handy. It’s not right.

Handy schmandy, Hannah says. None of this would be necessary if Handy didn’t make those decisions he made and get us into a bind and then back out of the Council of Nine. He abandoned us. Got us into a mess and left us to fend for ourselves.

He didn’t abandon us, Bit says. He’s still our spiritual leader.

Hannah snorts, says, Right. All-Arcadia Yogas? Remember the time he made us all have an Eyesight Yoga? No corrective lenses because they separate you from the spiritual world? Remember what happened?

Muffin fell in the well, Bit says.

And the Weeklong Silence Yoga?

The kidlets freaked out and had bad nightmares, Bit says.

And the Poverty Yoga? When we weren’t supposed to have medications or extra food for three months and send all that money we saved to Mount St. Helens victims?

Bit shivers, remembering: Hannah, off the pills she’d been taking religiously, had returned to the dark creature in the bed whom he’d had to slowly draw into the light so many times over the years. I remember, he says. Okay.

When they come into the sunflower field, Hannah shields her eyes from the glare and laughs to see Simon welding away at his sculpture. Bit was near Hannah when Simon sidled up to her in the Eatery the other day; he was close enough to overhear their conversation. Simon had been famous in the Outside, an artist. He was handsome, with hard blue eyes and a tight frowning face. He’d muttered to Hannah that he was building her a sculpture out in the sunflowers. She was his Muse, he said. For a moment, through Simon’s gaze on Hannah, her motherness fell away, and Bit saw her as lush and attractive as she must be to men, with her long golden braids and roundness and the warmth in her large eyes. Oh, she’d cried out happily, that’s so lovely of you, Simon, and Bit felt the beginning of the old anxiety moving through him, that she would break the fragile bond of family and find a new allegiance away from him.

When Bit says to Hannah, jostling her back onto the path, Are you really going to write a book? he knows he’s really saying, Please don’t change and leave me.

And when she touches his cheek with her callused hand and says, Maybe yes, maybe no, he knows she’s really saying, You don’t have to worry about me.

Helle comes up to Bit. Cole and Dyllie and Ike have pushed their dinner plates to the side, and they are playing kick hockey with a bottle cap they found in the Motor Pool.

Hey, she whispers, Bit, I need you.

Ike looks up, his face contorted with disgust; he hates his sister, he says, but he watches and mimics her. Cole looks up, too, confused. Dylan does not even see Helle; he has the gift of focus and is kicking the bottle cap across the table with his fingertips.

Gimme a second, guys, Bit says. He crosses the Eatery with Helle, feeling tall for the first time in his life. They go down the hallway where the Tuesday night bathers are waiting for their three weekly inches of warm bathwater, and into the Library. In the far corner, there is a raging book discussion of The Mismeasure of Man. Abe is there, face full of joyous argument. He sees Bit and lights up further, and waves, blowing a huge kiss. Bit pretends to be embarrassed.

Helle turns to Bit. I need you, she says again, so low only he can hear it, and she twists the hem of her teeshirt in her hands. She is jittery, darting. You’re the perfect accomplice, nobody ever gets mad at you. Please, please, please, she says.

There is magic in perfect, in accomplice, and he says, without thinking, All right.

They go up the grand Entryway stairs, hearing the noises of a house overfull with people: someone plays on a common room piano (stuck D-flat), the recorder group trills its way through a madrigal, voices are raised, shouting or just discussing, babies shriek and are hushed with breasts or murmurs, the kidlets in the Dormitory across the courtyard are singing the good night song: The Dream passes by the window. And Sleep by the Fence. . He follows Helle into the brightest, biggest common area. Arcadia House is arranged around six central common rooms, each area separating into anywhere from twelve to fifteen bedrooms big enough for two adults or three tightly packed Ados. This common room they are in is the grandest: the two-story windows hold the dying sunset, the people pouring across the lawn, the lights coming on down in Ersatz Arcadia. There’s a catwalk with another floor of bedrooms up a curved staircase that Bit can never look at without a sense of foreboding.

Helle puts her hand on Bit’s lips and pushes open Handy’s doorknob. Before Bit can protest, they’re in. Handy and Astrid have the largest bedroom in Arcadia House, two smaller rooms knocked into one, from a time so long ago when there was more space than Arcadians to fill it. Ludicrous thought! In the wall, there is a door built leading to Lila and Hiero’s bedroom.

Why are we here? Bit whispers, something curdling in his throat. When the community grew beyond Arcadia House, four years ago, they established the Council of Nine, an elected board, and although he and Astrid were given permanent seats, Handy protested: let it all grow organically, he said. But the rest were afraid that the needs of people down in Ersatz Arcadia, the Hens and Singletons and Newbies and Nudists, would be ignored for those of the privileged up in the House. In a pique, Handy withdrew, mostly to his room. Although all bedrooms in Arcadia are ostensibly open to everyone, Handy’s alone feels sacrosanct. Bit has never heard of anyone just walking in.

Helle is on her knees digging through Handy’s cardboard chest of drawers. Bit runs his hand over the instruments mounted on the wall: guitar, ukulele, banjo, sitar, fiddle. He peers into the closet. Astrid’s side is severe, the long sack dresses, the clogs, the folded shawls. Handy’s overflows with Hawaiian shirts and army jackets, corduroys, luxurious heaps of newish socks.

When Bit turns to Helle, she is draped across the bed. He remembers the Indian spread from the Pink Piper long ago, but in the wedge of late, sickly sunset, the pinks and golds seem alive. Helle’s threadbare teeshirt goes transparent, and he can trace the slopes of her ribcage, the warm nestle of her belly button, the pointy bra that all women of Arcadia wear, a Dumpster full of them found outside a lingerie factory in Binghamton. The bow between the cups seems as delicate as a petal to Bit, as if it would fall off if touched.

She sees him looking. Come here, she says. He goes and lies in the dying light beside her. You have a girlfriend, Bit? she says. She smells like the vanilla the girls beg off the Bakery and dab at their wrists, napes, behind their ears.

No, he says. He is careful not to touch any part of her, even the fabric of her shirt. In profile, there are hollows under her cheekbones. She looks like the feral cat that haunts the Octagonal Barn: angular, hungry.

I had a boyfriend Outside, she says. He was forty. A bartender. Her smile is a private one. She says, He took care of me. She turns her head, and he can feel her breath against his cheek.

Did he know you’re only fifteen? Bit says.

She closes her eyes, turns her head away. Didn’t matter, she says.

He would lie like this forever. It doesn’t matter that they’re not touching. Her weight bends the mattress, her warmth radiates the length of his arm. She palms something and puts it in her mouth and swallows it. When she turns to him, she holds another pill in her hand, something red and white, and puts it gently between his lips.

Swallow, she whispers.

He holds the pill there between his lips for a long while, debating. When the first line appears between her eyebrows, he swallows the pill. She closes her eyes. Good Bit, she says, petting his arm.

He doesn’t know how long he is there with Helle; the window goes black. He watches her as she rests. Then her eyelids spring up when the door opens and the light goes on overhead. He feels a bad sickness stir at the roots of him.

What the? says the old familiar raspy voice; Handy is home. Oh. Helle, he says.

Handy puts down his guitar case in the closet and sits on the ladder-backed chair on the side of the room.

Heya, Little Bit, Handy says, nodding to him. May I ask what you two are doing in my room?

Helle struggles up, pulling at the hem of her teeshirt, her movements exaggeratedly slow. Handy, she says. Just relaxing.

You couldn’t find any other place in this big old barracks to relax, huh? he says. Like a common area? Like your own room?

He’s smiling, but his cheeks look too taut. If only Bit could find his tongue, he would be glad to tell Handy all about it.

Astrid let me come into your room whenever I wanted to, Helle says.

Astrid’s not here, Handy says. Did you ever imagine, Helle, that I might have had a visitor tonight?

We are your visitors, Helle says.

You know what I mean, Handy says.

I know what you mean, Helle says, and whatever drug had tarred her voice is gone: it is now the crispest thing in the world. She says, Fiona, right, Handy? I think that’s just sick. She’s like three years older than I am. You knew her when she was four.

She’s of age, Handy says. Not that it’s any of your business.

Oh, no, Helle says. It’s none of my business, even though you’re my dad. And Astrid is none of my business either, even though she’s my mom. Why she chose to open up the school all the way down in Tennessee way far away from you isn’t my business, clearly. Never, no, not at all. We don’t get involved in each other’s lives in the Friis family.

My private life is my own, Handy says, his voice gone steely. Just as yours is your own.

Right, Helle says. Exactly. I can fuck whoever I want and you wouldn’t care.

Feel free, Handy says. Just do it somewhere else.

Okay, Helle says. Maybe I will. How about Kaptain Amerika? He’s old and ugly and fried as hell. Our kids would have gills or something. Maybe I’ll go seduce, oh, I don’t know, Hiero. What would you think about that?

I would think it would be awfully strange if Hiero would succumb to your oh so evident charm, Handy says.

I get my charm from my dad, Helle says. Hiero will love it. Or, what about, let’s see. Bit right here. Little Bit. Sweet and gentle little Bit, the kid who you always liked more than all the other kids in Arcadia, or so you said over and over again in front of us when we were little. Over and over and over, That Bit Stone is plugged in to the Universe, man, she says in Handy’s voice, then turns, furiously, toward Bit. So, what do you think? Want to do the nasty?

Helle, come on, Handy says. That’s enough.

Helle? Bit says so quietly that he may have only said it inside his own mouth.

What’s enough, Handy? What’s enough? What’s wrong with Bit?

There’s nothing wrong with Bit, and you know it, Handy says. You just leave Little Bit alone and don’t get him all mixed up with your dramas, okay?

Yeah, Helle says. Great. I get it. Bit, who is no blood relation to you, sparks your protective fatherly gene. Magnificent.

She turns to Bit, snarling, and he doesn’t understand what is going on, or why she hates him so much right now. Helle? he says. She’s running headlong from the room. Handy leaps up and bars her way. They struggle in the doorway, and Handy jams his hand down into Helle’s right pocket, and pulls out a plastic bag. You little idiot, he says, releasing her into the common room, where she rubs her upper arm. Already, a bruise is forming on her white skin. Handy says, You thought you could steal from me. She backs out the door of the common room, keeping her eyes on her father’s face, and when she reaches the hallway door, she pulls another bag out of her left pocket.

Thanks for the treats, Daddy dearest, she says, shaking it like a bell. Then she’s gone.

Bit finds himself standing in the middle of Handy’s room, his whole world swimming up around him. Handy turns to Bit, his face red. They look at one another across the expanse, and Handy says, Listen, Little Bit. I know your pops and me aren’t getting along right now, though we used to be best friends, and that grieves me. But I like you for you. Some kids just have goodness deep down in them, gentle little souls. So you do me a favor and stay as far away from my daughter as you can. That girl is fucked in the head, I’m telling you. You hear me?

Yes, sir, Bit says; and now he is irrationally afraid that Handy is going to ask him about the plot of weed on the little island in the woods, that it is all going to spill out of his mouth and then Hannah and Abe and he will be thrown from Arcadia into the cold night. He steps around Handy, and when he comes back down to the Eatery to his friends, they are still playing with the bottle cap, waiting for him. They scan his face. He can see each one coming to the decision not to ask him what happened. In the long draw of last light across the Eatery, as the tables around them are scrubbed with white vinegar and only they are left in their island of four, flicking the bottle cap from one to another in silence, he is grateful, again, for the infinite generosity of boys.

At the midafternoon field break under the wild cherrywood trees, Bit sits listening to two of the Circenses Singers who went to the rally against nuclear armaments in Central Park. They are talking about how Springsteen was both electric and a throwback, how the taste of a hot dog with yellow mustard brought them close to tears. Bit feels ill at the thought of meat in his mouth. Someone is saying: . . the countries were like little boys standing in a pool of kerosene, bragging about how many matches they have in their hands. .

Bit stops listening: Helle is nearing, under a huge sombrero, clutching a bouquet of cornflowers. She sits beside him and gives him the flowers. He holds out for ten seconds. Then he touches her thin ankle, forgiving her. She touches his knee, grateful to be forgiven.

After the discomfort passes — blazing sun forgotten, hotspots numbed to blisters, shoulders’ rise and dip overcoming the ache by sheer repetition — the future sharpens before him, the way every blade of grass on a clear summer morning seems etched by a pin. He is in Arcadia still. He feels himself older, his body tighter in the joints, the muscles softer. He can feel his parents nearby. And Helle is there, older, too, and smiling, and she loves him.

He feels his hope breathing and stretching, a living creature.

He closes his eyes to keep the daydream in. Fervently, he bargains. It doesn’t have to be as perfect as it had been in the brief pulse of a vision. He knows that a longing for perfection is the hole in the dam that can let everything pour out. He doesn’t have to be as elevated as Handy when he’s older, or even Abe, or even Titus; he can be a normal person, a worker bee, a Wolf. Helle doesn’t have to be so beautiful; she could lose her looks tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter. If he had to give up the quiet, good dreams he has started to have about himself, a life of making photographs, for Helle loving him, for living the rest of his life in Arcadia, he would.

He focuses again. Cole is at the end of the row looking at Bit, lines between his eyebrows. You okay, man? Cole says.

Language fails Bit. No words could possibly contain all he has to say. He manages to utter, at last, I’m okay, and this is enough for now.

The gang is in its hideaway in the basement, finishing the prank. Helle’s music blares on the deck, cassettes she’d shoplifted in the Outside. Cole nods to the driving beat, Dylan winces, Ike thrashes. Bit tries to listen, to love it, but unlike the friendly folk of his youth, this music is furious, full of rusted nails and bile, the darkness in the world beyond. It feels like private anarchy. Bit hopes nobody in the rooms above can hear.

Punk, Ike had said in his jittery way the first time he put it on. Sex Pistols. Fuck, yeah! Now he lies on a broken settee and spins out names for their own band.

The Pissers, the Fockups, Badmass Mothafathas, he says.

Dylan says, Spade and the Whities.

The rest are careful not to look at one another. Two months ago, Dylan discovered he was black, though everyone else, it seems, had known for years. Now Dylan teases his hair into a short Afro and hangs out at the Motor Pool with Peanut. Now he axes, digs, finnas to do. It is embarrassing to peachy white Cole how unnatural this language sounds in his little brother’s mouth, how hard he seems to be trying.

Hearts of Darkness, Biohazards, the Bloody Mayhem. Shrimp and the Shrimptones. No, no, no! Bit Sinister and the Kidney Stones, says Ike.

Bit puts down the toadstool on which he has glued a Monopoly house, liberated from a half-dead game at the Store. He is weary of his friends. Under his several pressures — the crop in the woods, Helle screaming at him the other night, sweet to him this afternoon — the boys seem childish, stuck in their innocence. Helle had invited Bit to a party at the Runaway Quonset tonight, Break down the invisible barriers between the Old and the New! she’d said. End the apartheid! but Bit had refused out of a sense of duty to his friends. Now he has a pang of regret. He would like to be near Helle, if just to insulate her from people like Armand Hammer.

He says, How about Antonine Plague and the Buboes?

Cole whistles. The other two go quiet. Then Dyllie nods and says, If that in’t just like Bit Sinister. Don’t say much, but when he do, it’s right on.

Right on, echoes Ike. Antonine Plague and the Buboes. Lead singer Isaac Vomit.

Excuse me? Cole says. Your voice is shit.

It’s punk. It’s supposed to be shit, says Ike, and Bit relaxes into their squabble.

Their hideaway is behind a heap of furniture that the Free People salvaged when they renovated Arcadia House so long ago: it is all broken, but not impossibly, waiting eight years for somebody to have free time to patch it up and put it back into commission. The boys have strung the marijuana plants they gleaned from the woods on the rafters, where they hang like sleeping bats. Cole rolls a spliff and passes it around. When Bit breathes the smoke out, the world relaxes the close of its fist on him.

He is grateful for marijuana. He’s sure it’ll stunt his growth, but he’s resigned to being five foot three. His friends have all beanpoled over six foot, even Dyllie, who is younger than Bit, thirteen in a month.

Bit shakes the gold paint he took from the Motor Pool and sprays the whole project.

Finished, he says. The others stand to look at his handiwork. Cole gives a low whistle. Bit Sinister, he says, you’re a fucking artist, man.

On a board, there is a tiny golden village of toadstools and windmills and even an octagonal barn Bit made of an oatmeal cylinder.

Time check, Bit says, and Dyllie looks at the clock he liberated from the Biz Unit, the only people who have a timepiece in Arcadia. He says, 4:30 a.m.

Showtime, Bit says. Ike gives a giggle. They put the balaclavas Peanut bought for them at Kmart over their faces. Now they are complete, transformed into their own dark side. A hippie gang, utopian goons; they call themselves the Sowers of Destruction.

They creep out into the night. Ike and Cole carry the diorama between them, Dyllie a bag of moss, Bit the box of accoutrements. Beyond the Tool Corner, the Pottery wheels, up the root cellar steps, into the courtyard. They hear a sound and pause to listen, but it is only the tap of oak branches against windows. They can still hear the party raging down at the Runaway Quonset, and Bit has to hold his breath to banish the thought of Helle high, Helle kissing someone else, Helle passed out on the floor.

Into the Children’s Wing they go, into the Schoolroom, up the stairs in their bare feet.

The breath of the sleeping children fills the Dormitory with sweetness. Maria and Phyllis sleep on cots in the corner; Sweetie sits in the overstuffed chair in the play area, snoring. The boys lower the miniature Arcadia carefully to the ground, and Bit takes out the sphagnum moss. Silently, they cover the board and its edges and place other bits of moss and wee ferns throughout the room. Ike sprinkles glitter on the pillows of the kidlets. Cole puts the teacups made of acorns on the windowsills. Dyllie scatters the pieces of birch bark with tiny cuneiform scratched on them. Bit presses footprints over every surface with a clothespin and baby powder.

Just before they leave, Bit motions the other three out. This is the trickiest moment, and if someone is to be caught, it should be him. He can contort himself out of punishment like a small Houdini. He closes a window and it comes down softly. Into the sill crack, he places two dozen butterfly wings: blue-dazzled, green, yellow, luna pale, moth brown with furry startled eyes.

Now he joins his friends out under the oak, leans against its warmth. It is near dawn. The cooks move in the Eatery.

Soon from the window they hear a little voice say a dazzled Oooooooh. Then it calls out, Wake up, wake up, wake up, the fairies have been here! Everyone, wake up!

Ike snorts into his hands. Cole bites his smile into his knees. Dyllie laughs.

Upstairs, the children shout, gleeful, voices pitched high. Sweetie laughs, delighted. And then a voice screams: Oh, my God! and begins to wail, and now Bit pictures a little girl finding the wings in the sill. He can see the delight fall off her face, her stricken expression when she understands that the fairies were smashed when the window fell.

No, a boy cries. No, no, no!

Bit’s heart is wrenched. He stands, agitated, would take it all away if he could.

Sweetie cries out, Nonsense. She lifts the window. Look! There’re no fairy bodies here! They just put their wings down to rest and we woke up before they could put them on again and fly away. I bet they’re hiding somewhere in this room, hoping we don’t look for them too carefully or else we’ll see them.

She leans out the window, and there’s a touch of menace to her voice when she says, In fact, I bet if we all go to breakfast really fast, they’ll be gone by the time we get back.

A torrent of little bodies passes through the courtyard in nightgowns and pajamas, into the Eatery. When they’re gone, Sweetie says to the air, I’d say the fairies have fifteen minutes to do their business. Then she, too, goes in. Cole whispers, Aw, don’t listen to my mom, she’s lame. But there is a flush on his perfect skin, tooth marks in his lips. Even Dylan looks ill.

This is awful, Bit says, near tears.

Ike says, Come on, Bit, man, it’s like the whole point of the Sowers of Destruction, to be mean. The little kids are ripe peaches of disillusionment, ready to be plucked. He laughs, awkward, his Adam’s apple dancing in his throat. Bit has to force himself to see the Helle in Ike so that he doesn’t hate his friend. He is alone when he slips in and gathers up the wings in his hands. He puts them into his pockets, where they burn during breakfast, then runs out to bury them in a hole deep in the forest, saying the loveliest words he can find to make it all better again.

Even this, he knows, may not be enough. Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.

Late June and the world bursts with greenery. Abe is throned in his chair, the center of a circle of boys on the ground under the oak in the courtyard. The other kids and Ados are scattered across the grass: Kaptain Amerika reading Chaucer with the older girls, Marlene leading four-year-olds through German numbers, Peter and Theo conversing like sages in Hebrew. It is Bit’s second meeting of the History of Revolutions Tutorial. State Lessons are over for the summer, and the Tutorial was Bit’s idea so that he could see his father every day, but to his surprise, eight other boys signed up on the bulletin board in the Eatery and are listening intently as Abe talks. Today, the theme is Satan. The mind is its own place, Abe says, and in itself can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. The apostate angel said that, Paradise Lost. The ur-rebel. Ike, what do you think?

Ike tries to answer, but his mind jitters off like a lizard when he thinks, and he is left with a handful of tail-thought. He says, Like, isn’t Satan just then building the big old palaces of Hades? Building his own place?

He is, Abe says. But that’s not what he means. Bit, go ahead.

Bit says, We make our own heavens and hells. He’s saying that things look bad but we can transform what they are by applying thought to our situations. When we are in hell, it’s our own fault. It seems like a kind of radical idea for the time Milton was writing because instead of putting faith in a God who predetermines everything, Satan is implying that we can be our own gods in a way. It’s privileging self-creation over being fated creatures who have no say in our destinies.

His heart pounds: he wants to follow his idea farther as it escapes through the grass, but Abe says, Good, good, and makes a motion with his fingers to slow Bit down for the others.

Cole says, face taut with confusion, Wait, but. Like, Satan says this and he’s bad? But we believe it, right? That people can create themselves. So what’s wrong with that?

Go on, Abe says.

For example, the Trippies, Cole says. I mean, we have to believe that they can make themselves better, or else we wouldn’t waste all the Minders’ time on them, right? And the whole idea of Arcadia. That civilization can be better if we just believe. Like the way Handy always says that we’re emanating light, and that light will touch the dark corners of the world and make them light, too. I mean, that George Eliot guy’s quote.

Go ahead, Abe says to Bit, eyes crinkling over his red beard.

Bit says, I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me. . That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and can not do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower. And Eliot was a girl, he says. Cole flushes, then lobs an acorn at Bit that nails him in the temple, and they laugh, friends again.

Great, Abe says, and Bit feels a burst of pride. Then he finds a handful of humility and covers it over.

Abe says, Both Satan and Eliot are backing up the same sort of idea, that desiring change is a powerful way of making change; that change unfolds from this desire. Harrison, tell us what you think about what Satan says, in the light of our everyday lives.

That we are doing good by trying to do good? says Harrison. That our intention is what matters?

Intention matters, says Abe. But if you listen closely to both quotes, it’s not the only thing. In Eliot and in Milton’s Paradise Lost, there’s the idea of struggle, the attempt to act in order to make your heaven come to fruition. So push your thinking. Let’s use Arcadia as a case study. Think about how things are these days. Think about what you most desire to do differently, what doesn’t make sense, how we should act on our good intentions in the way we’re not right now. We’re not in hell, but we’re getting there. And this is from someone who used to head up the Sanitation Crew in the middle of summer before I broke my neck. Believe me, I do know hell.

The boys laugh, but there is a new tension between them, and when the laugh dies, they are suddenly shy. The wind picks up among the oak branches and waggles spots of light all over them. Okay, says Harrison, at last. He is the oldest boy in the Ado Unit, used to speaking up. I guess one thing is that we’re all supposed to be equal, and yet Handy is still our leader, making commands and things. It just doesn’t square to me. Why do we need a leader and the Council of Nine? Shouldn’t we all just democratically make up our own rules?

Yeah, says Dylan. Plus, he never works like everyone else. It’s like he’s the head Trippie or something.

Hey, says Ike so softly that only Bit hears him. Abe smiles. He says, Down with the king!

Abe’s blasphemy takes a moment to set in. When it does, things go still. Kaptain Amerika’s head stops, mid-swivel, mid-Chaucer. Caro unbends mid-stand from her French lesson, a bird is caught in a net made of air.

Ike says, You mean, my dad is, like, getting in the way of democracy?

Time snaps back. Three stories above, Handy’s head comes poking from his bedroom window. His jowls hang; his beard forks; he is uplit yellow by the sun reflected off the hard dirt below. Abe sees the boys looking and peers upward, his lips parting in a smile.

I’ll be right down, Handy calls out, and withdraws his head.

Oh, goody, Abe says, looking at his ring of boys.

They wait. A sour wave rises in Bit’s gut. Handy lopes out of the Eatery with his banjo in his arms, twiddling a mindless little tune, and when he comes to their group, he seems relaxed. He leans up against the tree, towering over them all. He finishes his song and puts the banjo on the ground. Abraham Stone, he says, in a voice that almost seems admiring. Fomenting discord. So openly, too. Nobody ever said you weren’t ballsy.

It’s a Tutorial, Handy, Abe says. I’m not fomenting anything.

Yes. You’re pure of purpose in all things, Handy says.

Perhaps I am, Abe says. Perhaps our purposes have diverged.

Perhaps you’re the one who has diverged, Handy says.

Perhaps, Abe says. But the converse is equally valid. That I have stayed anchored in our original aims and it’s Arcadia that has drifted.

Pretty, pretty, Handy says. Oh, you talk so pretty, Abe.

Yes, ad hominem, the defense of petty minds, Abe says.

Handy is pink around the nostrils. He smiles down at Abe, his gray eyetooth winking. He takes a few breaths and says in an exaggerated country accent, shaking his head sorrowfully, It is a sad sight, kids, the day a true believer loses his belief. Like a snake with his spine ripped out; all a sudden, he ain’t nothing but a worm.

Abe goes pale, and clutches at his useless knees. Bit stands and puts himself between Handy and Abe. He can feel Handy’s breath on his face. They look at one another for a while. Bit’s heart is so loud it overwhelms the day.

I meant, of course, the worm in the age-old apple, Handy says, beaming into Bit’s face so intensely that Bit has to fight the smile echoing behind his lips.

We’re taking this inside, Abe says and turns his wheelchair and slowly squeaks into the Schoolroom. Handy, playing the same cheery tune on the banjo, follows him in. What just happened? says Ike, and Bit presses his friend’s arm. I don’t know, he says. A few moments later, Hannah runs up from the Soy Dairy, her legs embarrassingly long under too-short cutoffs, and then a few other adults pour in, Lila and Titus, Horse and Midge. When the adults’ voices again begin to rise, the little children scatter from the Schoolroom, a handful of seeds.

Helle, lolling on the flat stone by the Pond on a hot, gray day, her pupils swallowing her golden irises. Helle, in the common area, playing rummy with the other Ados, boneless, leaning up against Harrison, rubbing her heel against Arnold’s thigh, smiling through her eyelashes at Bit, none of the three boys looking at one another. Helle, asleep in the sunflowers when Bit runs back from watering the Pot Plot, awakening only when he slaps her. Helle, coming up from the Runaway Quonset at dawn, nearing Bit, who stands in knee-deep Queen Anne’s lace, waiting for her. Helle, close to Bit and he can smell the marijuana on her, the sweat, the vanilla, the kerosene from the lamps, and she puts her head on his shoulder, and holds him closely to her, and he can feel her ribs against his, her knees hard on his knees, and he wants to be angry but can only put his arms around her. Pulling away her head, eyes full of tears, Helle says: You’re my only friend, Bit, and holds his hand as he walks her back to her room. With every step, something goes wobbly in him.

He takes photograph after photograph of Helle, and she vamps for him, blushing under his attention, flaring her fingers like gills, moueing like a model. Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper.

Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you.

She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of.

It is a week until Cockaigne Day. The third-grade kidlets have put an enormous kraft-paper calendar on the Eatery walls, and the days are filling up with beaming, big-maned suns. Time is slippery in Arcadia; the gong rules the days, the seasons rule the rest. The calendar feels to Bit, unused to such order, like an imposition. Arcadia seems strangely hushed since the great fight during the Tutorial, which has taken on epic tones as the rumor of it has passed from person to person. There is a sickness in the air.

At dinner one night, they flee the tension, Hannah and Abe and Bit. In three mornings, Hannah and Bit will go to harvest the crop, and spend the next few nights in the Sugarshack to cure it. Every subtle changing tone in the daylight brings them closer to the end point. They are thrilled, they can hardly sit still, even Abe, who has no choice. Now they are together on a blanket spread under the copper beech, in the cool summer evening, and Bit feels the old happiness circling him, watches his mother’s hands flying like swallows to portion out the food, sees the way Abe looks at Hannah with his heart in his face. If he weren’t undone by gratitude for this old companionship returned to him, he wouldn’t say the silly thing he says. Which is: What if the Pigs find the Plot before we can pick it?

How odd that this deep, murmuring fear would choose now to emerge. Between Hannah and Abe, a line tightens, a subtle disappointment in Bit.

Unbearably, his parents ignore Bit’s question. They talk about the fireworks Clay and Peanut bought for Cockaigne Day, the shameful waste of funds. They talk about Hannah’s lecture, how the slides have come out beautifully, thanks to Bit’s new photography skills. They talk and talk, and Bit is alone in the chilly shadow, food in his hands, as he watches his parents move off into conversation without him, leaving him to sit alone in his clammy worry.

Verda is the best thing Bit can think of to give Helle. She is the biggest unknown piece of him; her wisdom, her calmness can give Helle an anchor, the way the old woman anchors Bit. Until they can slip away today, though, they are with the rest of the Ado Herd, weeding the corn. Bit loves the breeds: Blue Baby, Reid’s Yellow Dent, Bloody Butcher. Dorotka has been collecting seeds for a decade, and people send her the strangest ones they can find as gifts. He loves the carrots: Dragon, Scarlet Nantes, St. Valery, Paris Market. The potatoes: Caribe, Desiree, Yellow Finn, Purple Viking. The peppers he skirts because he once touched the leaf of a Fatalii and rubbed his eyes and could see nothing but a shifting red light for two weeks, which he spent in bed in the Henhouse. Blind, a birth was a horrible event to overhear.

Leif curses the weeds as he pulls them, ever more inventive. Bloodyballed codpiece, he says. Funkadilic dildo, he says. He hates any time spent away from his art. That boy loves puppets more than people, Bit heard Hannah whisper in the spring, watching Leif at a Circenses Singer performance. Takes after his father, Abe muttered out of the side of his mouth, and both his parents snorted, then flushed when Midge turned around and hushed them furiously.

Helle comes to him at the end of a row, and they steal off together into the woods. The air is cool, brushing past his skin like water.

Helle says, with a catch in her throat, I saw something today. A girl out in the garden. It was really early. She was super little, like five or something and naked, and she was crouched there under a cucumber, chewing on an ear of corn. Like a wild child, like one of those feral children you read about. And I got so upset, looking at her, that I wanted to throw up. I mean, this little girl. So hungry she’d run out in the morning to eat unripe vegetables. With all these people showing up every single day, these strangers. I mean, what if one of them was a bad person? What if a Trippie saw her and flipped out and hurt her? Who was there to protect her? I’m sorry, I don’t get what’s going on anymore, I just don’t get it. I don’t. Helle’s voice has a tremble in it, but her face is pale and blank.

I don’t either, Bit says.

It’s so weird, says Helle. Nothing’s right. Remember when we were little, Bit, and no matter how bad it was, we were always this tight little unit? I keep thinking of felt, the fabric, you know? I mean when you take a sweater or a piece of knitting and you soap it up and rub until all of the threads and rows blend together in this one inextricable mass. But now we have like a million insane knitters all doing their thing in their own little directions, and this guy’s making a belt, and this chick thinks she’s making a pot holder or something, and we’ve got the biggest, ugliest, dumbest blanket of all times that can’t even cover us and keep us warm. She stops and laughs and says, low to herself, Holy fucking metaphor, Helle.

It’s dead on, says Bit. Listen, he says, and then, feeling as if he is pushing against a current that is just about to dash him over a waterfall, he tells her about Hannah and Abe’s project, the Great Pot Plot, the cash, the relief that will be sure to come.

It’ll be all right, he says. After Cockaigne Day. Don’t worry. We’ll have enough then.

She looks at him, biting her thumbnail, and says nothing at all.

They come into Verda’s yard, the stone cottage, the cherry. Verda is out in the garden, tossing corn to her chickens. She frowns when she sees Helle and looks at Bit narrowly, her meaning clear: Another visitor? Don’t you know I choose to be alone?

He looks at her with hope in his face, and she sighs and says, Might as well come in.

They do. Helle and Verda sit stiffly across the table, sipping tea, studying each other through their eyelashes. The conversation is surface-bright: weather, Cockaigne Day, Bit. If he didn’t know Verda so well, he would say the visit was going swimmingly, but her nostrils have flared as if they smell something off, and her answers have become increasingly curt.

They stand to go, and Helle bends to pet Eustace on the floor, and Verda, uncharacteristically, reaches and pulls Bit to her. She smells good, like sun-dried clothes and Amish soap. She says in his ear, fast and low, Careful, Ridley. Most powerful people in the world are young, beautiful girls.

Then she releases him and shows them to the door.

Out in the day, Helle looks unsatisfied. They are halfway home when she says, I know she’s your friend, but. ., and she trails off. Later, she shivers and says, That whole time? I was imagining how I’d feel to be so old and so alone like her. I think I’d kill myself.

Oh, Helle, Bit says, choked.

She looks at him, and says, I’m just kidding, Bit. But her voice is heavy, and when she goes up to her room to take a nap, he can hardly bear to let the door close between them.

In the middle of the Photography Tutorial, Bit has a moment: there is the evening sun and the heft of the Leica in his hands, so right, so his, to him the most valuable thing in Arcadia. There are the other Tutorials in the courtyards, the young heads alongside older ones, and he feels, with a gathering of wonder, how this is exactly what makes Arcadia great: this attention to potential, this patience for the individual, the necessary space for the expansion of the soul; and he sees the way Helle darts glances at the glorious warm sky, the chipmunks chittering on the eaves of Arcadia House, her own dirt-crusted feet, how she sees Bit looking and smiles her rubber-band smile, and it fills him to overflowing. And when, at last, the children in the Kid Herd launch into a spirited version of “Tea for the Tillerman” with bongos and tambourines, it is all he can do to be cool, to not get up and dance like a holy fool filled with the ecstatic light of god, like the print Hiero showed them last week by his namesake Hieronymus Bosch, a garden where nude people gathered in mussel shells and fruit, spilled from organlike pink huts, rode joyously in a rodeo of pigs and leopards, let finches drop berries into their mouths, every person on the canvas filled with a quiet, green joy. Bit has to hold himself in and breathe in and out until the happiness returns to a safer distance, until it becomes a blanket of sun, of children, of calm, of Arcadia, and Bit is once again only one thread within the greater whole.

At supper, Bit watches Simon sidle up to Hannah and whisper. A bolt in the gut when Hannah flushes. She says, loudly enough to carry to Bit: All right, then. Dawn.

All night, he imagines Hannah vanishing. He imagines waking up to a world empty of her forever, that old fear from deepest childhood. Bit is at the front door when Hannah comes out, her step soft, her feet bare under her overalls. She sees him and murmurs, My knight in shining armor, and ruffles his hair.

The nitid knight of nighttime delight, he says to make her laugh, but she doesn’t.

Together they walk to the field. Simon meets them, pacing anxiously, where the sunflowers pour from the throat of the woods. Aztec Sun, Irish Eyes, Velvet Queen. His hair is wet and parted down the middle; he is wearing jeans so new they creak when he walks. He frowns when he sees Bit and looks at Hannah meaningfully, but she is examining a mosquito bite on her arm. Simon says, Oh, come on, and turns his back and strides off through the plants. They follow. Hannah’s hand grazes Bit’s, and Bit lets her hold it. The day is only a new shine on the furry leaves. In the center of the field, Simon’s work stands, a fist covered in tarps. The flowers are at shoulder level and shush as they walk through, and by the time they wend their way to the center, the sky has already flushed with light.

They stand before the sculpture for minutes, in silence. When Simon judges the light to be perfect, he goes around the back, and they hear a hatchet strike twice. The rope releases, the tarp falls like a skirt.

Bit laughs, but Hannah pinches his upper arm, quick and searing. She says, Simon, it’s wonderful. Simon looks at her, his eyes pools with stony bottoms.

What seemed to be a humble windmill, beginning to spin in the slight wind, reveals its parts to be more. The spokes are rifles, the heart the nose of a bomb. When Bit goes to touch the legs of the structure, they are sharp.

Swords to plowshares, Hannah says. Her cheeks are flushed.

Bit says in his manliest voice, Really? Did it have to be so literal?

Don’t be a teenager, Hannah hisses, and Bit is stung.

Simon ignores Bit, explains. On one of the Motor Pool’s scavenging missions up near Canada, Simon had found an abandoned automobile with a cache of rifles in the trunk. Old bootlegger, he thought, lost in the woods. That’s where the idea came from. Then in an army-navy store, he found the bomb nose, mounted like the head of a deer. The swords he’d made himself on the forge. It was supposed to be an embodiment of all that was great about Arcadia. The peace, the work, the simplicity.

It’s magnificent, Hannah says. It works?

It works, says Simon and flips a small lever, and the windmill spins and hums. There is a bitter tone to his voice when he says, In this blasted place, there is no use making something that doesn’t function. Even I know that.

Bit thinks of giving a gift of art, something he’d put his whole being into, and having it fall so terribly flat. For a brief spasm, his empathy for Simon floods the irritation, glazes the strange-looking windmill with a beauty born of Simon’s love.

Thank you, Hannah says, and Simon nods. He seems crestfallen. They walk back together. Hannah gives Simon a hug, and Bit finds himself gauging the length of the embrace, its force, the way Hannah doesn’t look Simon in the face when she pulls away. He thinks of Abe still sleeping, his legs shrunken under the sheets. Because of this, he escorts Hannah back to her small room. He waits until she knocks and Abe’s voice answers and she goes in, and only when she is safely back with Abe does the eel thrashing in his stomach swim away.

Bit and Hannah were awake long before dawn to cut and load the hemp into a pickup truck; now their hands are raw, their clothes steam with sweat in the chilly morning. In the deep blue minutes before sunrise, they hustle the flour sacks of bud and leaf into the Sugarshack and park the pickup they used back in its spot in the Motor Pool. When the Eatery doors open, they beg entrance, though it isn’t their shift, and sit, exhausted, over coffee. Eden stops by, pregnant for the eighth time, and whispers that there is an Emergency Council of Nine called for tonight in the Octagonal Barn. Bit watches her waddle away and, with a terrible sense of sorrow, sees the old, zaftig Eden superimposed over the one whose body has been flattened by the eight tiny steamrollers of her babies.

All day, a sense of panic taints the air: someone, somewhere, advertised Cockaigne Day, although nobody knows who, or nobody will admit to knowing. But here it is in High Times, Whole Earth Catalog, Henderson’s. A tiny write-up in the Voice. Arrivals have picked up this week, thirty on Monday. Today, the Thursday before Saturday’s Cockaigne Day, Bit walks to the Gatehouse and finds a zoo: two hundred visitors. Though Titus has emergency backup to keep people from crashing, his method worked only in the beginning of the week. The visitors have begun to find their way in through the woods. Now they pitch tents in the forest, sleep in the cars, mass up at the Eatery for grub. They grumble when the food runs out. They go into Ilium and come back swinging greasy bags of burgers, and even though Titus pitches a fit that roars all the way up to Arcadia House, they persist.

At dusk, it is so crowded in the Octagonal Barn for the Emergency Meeting that there is no place to sit. People stand, and some climb the lofts and rafters and sit in the dark up there. The Council is at the fold-out table, Abe on one end, Handy at the other. On hot humid nights like this, the ghost scents of ancient animals rise from the floors and fill the air. Hannah rushes in. She leans over Abe, whispering, and runs back out.

Bit watches his father go paper white. Steady Abe loses his composure so entirely that the debate is well on its way before he seems to snap to. Titus is roaring, reading out a list: What if we’re harboring a murderer? A pedophile? What if one of our people gets killed? Raped? What if some of the Runaways’ parents are trying to find them? What if the girls lie about their age in the Swingers’ Tents and they’re underage? What if we’re hiding a terrorist?

For three pages, he goes on, and in these words, Bit can hear Abe. Something relaxes in Bit, now that Titus is firmly on his parents’ side.

Then Handy opens his hands on the table. He says, First of all, it’s only going to be for Cockaigne Day, and then they will all have to either go or live in Newbieville for the month, as per our rules. And secondly, he says, going very stern, Titus, I resent your bigotry. Even murderers, he says, deserve a second chance.

There is a whoop and holler, voices all over the Octagonal Barn rising in agreement.

When it calms, Abe says, What about food? We have no money to feed anyone, Handy, especially with the dough we’re sending to Astrid’s Midwifery School, and the other stuff that’s happening. Even our own Trippies and the medicine for the Hens strain us. You know this. You of all people know this, Abe says.

Handy says, I stand, as always, humble in the knowledge that the Universe will provide.

On and on they debate for an hour, until Regina with her black brows claps the mallet. We’re not getting anywhere. Vote time, she says. Lanternlight glimmers on her cheekbones.

The vote passes to the Council of Nine; five yea to allow the gate-crashers to stay, four nay to drive them out. Down the stretch of the table, Abe and Handy look at each other, fury against gloat. Bit thinks of a high front meeting a low, the storm that ensues.

Abe is tongue-tied, scarlet: he would kick something, if he could. The meeting moves on.

It is too much tension for Bit, and his stomach goes sour. He leaves and runs across the twilit lawn down to the Sugarbush, to see why Hannah was so agitated. He gives a long knock, three short; two short; one long, Bit in Morse code. Hannah opens for him.

It is a swelter in here, a hundred twenty degrees. The stove is being fed with wood, and Hannah is in her knickers, soaked through with sweat. She has drawn the curtains and is reading by flashlight in the corner. Heaped on the screens are quantities of drying herb. But it doesn’t seem like very much to Bit. Not enough, certainly, to finance all of Arcadia for a year.

Bit says, Weird. Seemed like a lot more this morning.

Hannah says, That’s because it was. Now he sees what he’d missed in the gloom: Hannah is livid, her face trembling. I went out for a pee, she says. I didn’t bother to lock up. Ran back in a minute later and three fourths of the junk was gone. Gone. Like that. One pee, and thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of the best of our bud, gone.

Bit thinks of Helle looking at him from the corners of her eyes in the woods, biting her nails, just after he told her about the Pot Plot. He wants to shrivel into nothing. This is his fault. Something must cross his face, because Hannah says, Bit? Did you tell anyone about this?

The sudden divide, the seesaw, and he has only a moment to choose.

No, he says.

His mother turns away, nodding. Sweat trickles in the dark hollow between her shoulder blades. When Bit offers to stay up all night with the drying weed, Hannah says, thoughtfully, No. I don’t think so.

Bit waits outside her door, reading, but Helle doesn’t come back that night. When she staggers in at dawn, rum fumes precede her into the Ado Unit Common Room, and she is inarticulate. Bit helps Jincy and Molly put her to bed. He stands, watching her sleep, and Jincy squeezes Bit to her chest. Good, sweet Jincy, his first friend.

She doesn’t deserve someone like you, she says in his ear.

We’re just friends, Bit says.

Right, Jincy says gently. I’m kicking you out, friend Bit. It’s time for you to go to sleep.

Midmorning, Bit passes the open window of the Cannery, where a work crew is putting up raspberries. He overhears a woman saying. . Helle. Acting out since she’s been back.

Another woman says, . a Trippie, if she isn’t. .

Someone says, Georgia! then laughs.

I saw. . a murmur.

Louder again, . like her father.

Too much, says someone, emphatically.

Bit looks in. The women wear men’s undershirts soaked through, identical blue bandannas on their heads. With the dimness, the distance, the uniforms, he can’t tell who they are. They could be the same anonymous woman. To Bit, right now, they are.

Bit rises, unable to sleep. Outside, the hundreds of extra people in Arcadia make a roar like what he imagines an ocean sounds like. Ike is snoring through his nose. There is a light under the door from the Common Room, and when he goes out into it, he finds Helle with a kerosene lamp. She’s sitting on the spavined couch, staring at a book. She looks up when she sees Bit and claps the book shut.

Hey, she whispers. Hey, he says. In his throat, his sorrow, thickening. He wants to ask her why she stole from them; why she wants Arcadia to starve. He wants to tell her that he knows. But she looks so sad that he can’t, not yet. She must be coming down from some high: her pupils are still huge, and the long rubber band of her mouth ends at the corners in bitter knots.

He sits next to her, and she puts her head in his lap. He can feel her breath warming his thigh, her eyelashes as they slide across his skin. He thinks of his hands washing dishes in the Eatery, sliding gunk off plates, scraping compost, the steam so hot on his fingers they feel like they’re blistering, anything to keep himself in control. He scratches her scalp, moving between the dreadlocks, her oils collecting in his nails. His hands move to her long neck, kneading the knots out of it, and he sees how small her ears are, tiny mouse ears, so delicate under her haystack of hair that he wants to gnaw them. With this thought, his penis gives an involuntary jerk. She must feel it. She sits up. The skin of her face looks loose, and there are shiny dark places under her eyes. She studies Bit for a moment. She clicks out her retainer, trailing silvery filaments of spit, and leans forward, and puts her mouth on his.

It’s a shock, this kiss. It is his first. To taste her breath, pungent with the anise seed some Arcadians chew after dinner. How rubbery her lips are, the strange slabby tongue in his mouth, their teeth clinking. He is shaking. He thinks about the Common Room door opening, someone seeing them on the couch. She takes his hand and slides it up her shirt to one of the dough lumps there. She takes her hand and unbuttons his jeans, her cold knuckles on his lower belly. It is too much for him. He gasps, there’s a great, woolly spasm, and his shorts have a hot wet spot in them.

He wants, badly, to cry.

She pulls away, and now her hand is under his chin. She brings his face up until he looks at her, pale, serious, determined. Let’s try again, she says and moves her mouth close. Her hands in the waistband of his jeans. Her hands against his skin, warming him. Bit lets himself go, sink into this strangeness. This is it, he thinks. This, Helle’s softness against his, her weight, the hard tailbone against his thigh, her legs lifting, and the sudden welcome, this, this, is the culmination of all good things he has ever known. There is a hunger in him to stay here forever, suspended.

And then the worry returns as she bites his lips to keep him from groaning: entering him as if from the depth of her mouth come the warring feelings, a ghost in either ear, that what she is doing to him just now is either a deep kindness or a deeper curse.

Midsummer, a tongue of heat in the air. Cockaigne Day is here.

Music squeals and bashes against other music: someone has plugged in an electric guitar down at the parking lot on the County Road, a ring of chanting men in saffron robes beside the Bakery. Three dueling transistors play at the Pond: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Cat Stevens.

Let me wander if it seems to be real switch on summer in your garden it’s an illusion from a slot machine. . A chimera of song.

Someone has rented a huge white-and-red-striped tent, where they’re staging a love-in for peace. Anyone can go in who has proof of age, but Cole sneaks in to see what’s going on, and when he comes out, his cheeks are blown up like a puffer fish’s with hilarity. The smell of shit intensifies, people pooping everywhere, neglecting to bury their spoor: Bit can almost taste it when he eats his porridge.

Astrid, down in Tennessee, has sensed something, or someone has told her there is trouble brewing. She drove all night from the Midwifery School and arrived this morning to see what she can do. At breakfast she stands, her hands on Hannah’s shoulders, the two tall women speaking softly to each other. They could be sisters, though their blondes are honey and white: the Twin Towers, everybody called them when Bit was growing up. But as he watches, Astrid’s face closes down and Hannah turns abruptly, walks away. When Bit asks what happened, Hannah, who hasn’t spoken to him since the Sugarbush incident, only shakes her head.

Later in the morning, Bit passes a bush jostling wildly, someone fucking someone within. He wants to take a stick and beat them out of there like birds from a tussock. Instead he shouts, There are kids here! and his voice is so high, so childlike itself, it must shame them into pausing because the bush stops shaking until he is past.

He walks up to Arcadia House with hot eyes. Someone built a badminton court among the lettuces, and the tender leaves are trampled. Dorotka is on her knees, sobbing in them (Forellenschluss, Red Leprechaun, Lollo Rossa, Amish Deer Tongue, Merveille des Quatre Saisons). He can hardly look at her, the granny glasses speckled with tears, the loop of her peppery braids, just as he can hardly look at the mangled ground when he puts his hand on her back, and pats and pats until she calms.

He is rolling vegegristle meatballs in the sweltering Eatery kitchen before lunch when he sees Helle go by the window. He is just in time to call out, Helle, wait, I need to talk to you, when she turns and flushes when she sees him, and gives a wave of her hand, and disappears into the thronging masses, some already drunk and dancing to music that Bit can’t, quite, hear.

They are gathered, at last, for Hannah’s Cockaigne Day address. The Proscenium blazes with light, the curtains are sodden with heat. A bead of sweat gathers on Hannah’s cheek and slowly trickles down her chin, although she has given only a few welcoming remarks. She has to shout her words over the noise rising up from the lawn outside.

In the past, people waited until after the address before they began the party.

In the past, of course, there was no flood of strangers to trample Arcadia’s etiquette; there were the stories that kept them in line. Cockaigne Day was just the twilight in midsummer and the Sheep’s Meadow mown so the rich green smell stirs them and the music and the love.

Still, something is going on that isn’t just the interlopers’ rudeness: tonight, the audience is pitiful. A stranger, wandering in, would never believe that Hannah had been here from the beginning, that to be invited to give the Cockaigne Day address is the greatest honor in Arcadia, that Hannah has been preparing for months. Bit writes the names carefully in his head: Abe, beaming with love; Titus and Saucy Sally and their many children; Sweetie and Maria and Ricky; Regina and Ollie; Astrid, looking especially grim. Marilyn and Midge, who fans herself, farting a little. Tarzan and Kaptain Amerika, Cole and Dyllie and Ike, Jincy, Fiona, Muffin. Helle sits beside Ike, smiling everywhere but at Bit. Late, in walk D’Angelo and Scott and Lisa. But that is it, that is it, that is it. No Dorotka. No Eden. Nobody else. No Handy, especially.

Behind Hannah, who speaks of the nineteenth-century Divinist cult that created Arcadia House, the lawns are roiling, masses busy with bongos or pot or bunched around a great trash barrel, which Bit suspects is Slap-Apple liberated from the Storeroom and laced with LSD. The Circenses Singers come white-robed over the lawn in slow-moving procession, the puppets doing their limber-jointed dances. Bit recognizes Leif’s blaze of white hair; he is operating the Fool puppet’s head. Adam and Eve waltz together, refreshed with a coat of peach paint. Even through the glass of the Proscenium windows, the song can be heard, the discordant tune, the drums, the hundreds of bells. A thick circle forms around the puppeteers, gawkers caught by their spell.

Bit imagines a great hand descending from the sky and smashing the revelers like a bad boy smashing a trail of ants. Ashamed, he tunes back in to Hannah. But the heat is brutal; even Bit is sickened and can’t listen as deeply as he’d like to her story. He notes that there are his slides and Verda’s voice unreeling into the dim from a recorder.

Hannah looks out, sees how her audience, though brave, has wilted. She says a little sadly, And here we are. Not unlike the Divinists, idealistic, hardworking, spiritual. Unlike them, she says, we know enough to learn from history and change before it’s too late.

She pauses to gather herself, and in the pause something explodes outside, a green firecracker snaking up into the dimming midsummer sky and bursting into red sparks. She turns to look behind her. Her golden hair is full of glints. And when she turns back, Bit can read on her face that she has decided to end it there.

Thank you, she says. Now let us all enjoy Cockaigne Day. And though they applaud her as greatly as they can in the echoing empty Proscenium, his mother’s shoulders slump as she walks down the stairs.

Outside, the air is cooling a little, the grass sweet-smelling, crushed. A wallpaper of people has spread across Arcadia House lawn, a shifting mirror game of hippies in their gauzy white dresses and halter tops and full-body denim. A long line from the kitchen moves the food out to the fold-out tables. There is lemonade for the kidlets. There is a great barrel of popcorn with nutritional yeast topping, mangled lettuce salad, tomato salad, tempeh salad. Bulgur wheat and bean salad. Spicy tofu salad. Yegg salad. Pasta salad. There are heaps of bread rapidly depleting. Rice and beans. Salsa. A vat of yam stew. So many pies that they will have no more preserves until harvest. Soy cream in pistachio, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. Some of the day visitors are not so bad: some have come back from various towns laden with grapes and bananas, crates of oranges, celery sticks, great cans of peanut butter, industrial bread, which tastes like paper to Bit. Huge bags of crinkled things someone calls chips that are so salty they make him gasp. Cookies from huge boxes that taste the way batteries do when licked.

As usual, the kids and Pregnant Ladies and Trippies go first, even though some of the new men are high enough to crash the line. When everyone has gone through, there is still some food left over. For a day, everyone eats their fill, then beyond until they can eat no more. Even Bit, who resists the excitement with the solid moral core of himself, relaxes when he is full and lets the summer night in.

Music begins in the Sheep’s Meadow amphitheater. Handy’s voice rises into the air, scratchy and magnificent, the Free People Band in fine form, banjo and fiddle and accordion each taking long, luxuriant solos. Tarzan, the drummer, is eloquent in this, his only language. The day darkens, and the joints and cigarettes outshine the fireflies. The kidlets are high on unaccustomed sugar and chase one another. Bit’s lungs burn with running, with laughing, scooping up the wee ones and throwing them in the air, catching them, wrestling his friends. Cole and Ike and Helle and he sneak to the vat of acid-spiked Slap-Apple and dip out four hurried mason jars. They take them behind the Octagonal Barn. Helle bites the rim of her jar with her smile and closes her eyes to down it. Bit watches her; he wants to smash it into her face, then, maybe, lick it off her chin. She looks at him and says, daring him, Scared?

He is. He likes his brain. He does not want to end up like Kaptain Amerika, forever tweaked. There are over sixty walking cautionary tales in Arcadia, burnt-out Trippies, their psyches gone rogue.

No, he says, and tosses it back, the alcohol burning his throat. Helle takes Bit’s hand as they come out from behind the barn to wait for the acid’s slow seeping in. Her fingers are cool in his, and though he wants to pull away, he doesn’t. As they walk, she squeezes.

Down at the concert, Handy is leading the whole bunch in “Goodnight, Irene.” In the little side area of Christmas lights, Astrid and Lila lean against one another, their eyes closed, swaying. Saucy Sally is tiny, clutched to Titus’s chest. Somebody whispers about a party at the Runaway Quonset, and the Ado Unit begins to trickle down that way. Bit and Helle pass the Pond, where puddles of clothes await the splashers who have gone in, naked. It is as full as the Pond generally is during a summer afternoon, but with adults, in the moonlight. Bit and Helle and Ike and Cole pass a group of four little kids who look up fearfully at the Ados going by, then go back to portioning out what Bit at first thinks are pebbles. He looks closer, sees blue pills. He tries to say something, but he has lost his words somewhere, and so he scoops up the pills and shoves them into his pocket. Some little kid kicks Bit’s ankle; he is showered with gravel as he walks away. The Runaway Quonset blazes with kerosene light, blasts with someone’s radio. Beside the crooked woodstove, there is another barrel of liberated Slap-Apple. There are so many people moving here that they become one shouting mass, a many-armed monster.

Helle whispers in his ear, and Bit doesn’t catch what she says. When he turns his face to her, his anger with her must be suddenly apparent. She jerks backward and disappears.

Now people sharpen into individuals. Little Pooh is dancing, throwing her arms up in the air. One stranger with teardrops tattooed on his face leans back on his arms and watches her; his friend, also in a black leather jacket, is pressed up against some Runaway chick on the wall. Bit looks at the jacket and sees a dead pig, and almost throws up when he passes by and smells an animal musk. Strange, he thinks, to find men here when most in this place are kids.

He loses this thought with a shock: on a cot, Jincy makes out with one of the Runaways, a chiseled black-haired boy with a vulture feather in his hair.

Hey, Jincy, Bit says, shaking her shoulder, and she looks up, smiling, says, Hey, Bit, and goes back to kissing. Let her get bird lice, who cares.

Ike puts in a tape, and new louder sounds roar into life. Misfits! he screams and bashes his head against the sound. He is sweating so much he has hoops under his arms. Bit’s own shirt is stuck to him.

Helle reappears, dreamy, confused. Hey, she says so softly only Bit can hear. That’s my tape? He wants to bite her lips. His body would like to melt into hers. He reaches up to her face, but when his hands get there they have turned into someone else’s and Helle is no longer before him, she is gone.

The acid has begun its work. Inside the universe he can feel something white and warm, pulsing. Time slows, stretches, becomes a spiral. The Runaway Quonset is full of beauty and it is terrible and Bit knows he is weeping: he knows what everyone is thinking because he has thought it himself, how Cole can feel the earth throbbing beneath his feet, how Helle’s body is warmed against Harrison’s as they press together, dancing, how Armand Hammer can feel Helle’s ribs as he, too, presses close from behind. How generous, he thinks, the boys are to not look at one another, how gracious it all seems to him. The faces around Bit begin to make such grotesque shapes that he can hardly believe a thing. No! he thinks, watching Cole’s eyeballs grow as big as his ears, No! Pooh’s lips swing to her knees, No! Helle’s face whittles away to a pinprick, to nothing. Everything is rich with the incredible.

The music splinters into fragments of light that he can catch with his mouth. It is so much, too much, overwhelming. He crawls to one corner and closes his eyes and whispers his own name, over and over and over, until someone picks him up and carries him away.

Somehow, he is outside, and the metal of the Runaway Quonset is cold on his back. Ike is beside him, and they are passing a joint back and forth. The earth burbles underfoot, he can hear the roots of the trees rubbing sexily against the dirt like legs rubbing against legs. Cole is against the Quonset, his lips locked onto the face of a pretty, tiny girl, his hand under her skirt. Bit peers and peers until he can make out Pooh. When Bit can winch his head around, Ike is blinking very fast and hard a few inches from Bit’s face.

I think — Ike’s breath is humid in Bit’s ear — I’m gonna get lucky tonight, and he laughs and staggers back inside.

Bit only wants to be alone. He pushes off into the dark of the forest to find a warm spot of dirt under a tree to curl up in. He wants the hold of the woods on him, the animals to crawl over him, he wants to sink into the roots of the trees and become the earth.

In this little hole at the base of the hill, the old stories fill him up again, the forest thick with magic, witches sitting in the cruxes of trees. This happens whenever he’s not protecting himself; the dark bad fairies are dancing endlessly below him in halls filled with rush light, in fur coats made of squirrel tails, in little shoes whittled from bear claws. They are planning their tricks, the beasties. If they saw him, they would blow poison nettles at him and make him fall asleep there, to awaken a century later, Bit van Winkle, his life gone by in sleep. He is so terrified he starts to cry, then forgets his fear in the beauty of his fingernails shining in the moonlight.

He walks. He touches the bark as he passes each hulking dark tree, and each bulges and sucks itself in. When the sound of the Quonset dims and blends into the more distant sound of the concert and there rises the rushing of the stream somewhere ahead, he realizes he must piss.

It has to be the right place: he touches tree after tree, and none gives him permission.

A new sound arises out of the forest, a low groan that, at first, he thinks is the music of the spheres, the great cold stars singing, not at all as lovely as he’d imagined. But it is too close, and Bit freezes, waits to see where the sound is coming from.

There, he sees a pool of darkness, an oil slick that grows upward, becomes a black lump on the ground, lit in some places by unshadowed moon. Even in his off-kilter brain, he knows it is a couple of people having fun. Something isn’t quite right, though, with the way the bodies are. Bit squints through the pulsing fog in his eyes. There is a person on top of another, yet the head of the second is in the wrong place, yards away, as if the body is both enormous and bent. A quickening, a rattle in the chest, a raw bear growl, and then a belt buckle tingles, the fucker stands over the fuckee’s legs.

Thanks, baby, comes a man’s voice quietly. You were amazing.

A voice rises, a girl’s. Sure, she says, it was fun.

Now the man says, Hey, you think you have a little sugar for my buddy here? What do you think? Share a little? If not, it’s totally cool, but he really digs you. Be a favor for me.

You’re just a gorgeous thing, says another voice, higher-pitched, male. Prettiest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time.

There is a long pause, then the girl says, hesitant, I don’t. .

Come on, says the first man. It’s no big deal. He kneels and begins to whisper, and at last, the girl’s voice emerges from the darkness. Okay, she says, with bravado.

The second man rises, belt jingles, crouches down, merges with the girl’s body on the ground.

Bit can’t move. He can’t breathe. The man finishes, and both men stand up, looking at the lump on the ground, struggling to sit. Let’s take her back, one says, and they pick the girl up between them and dust her off. One of them, it seems, picks something tenderly out of her hair.

Bit shrinks behind the tree beside him as they crash past over the sticks and leaves. They come straight at him, so close he can smell the musk of sex, clove cigarettes, blood, alcohol. Even closer, and he wills himself into the tree. They pass, and Bit sees a sprinkle of black under one man’s eye, the shimmer off a leather jacket, and Helle’s face gleaming like its own moon, a comet tail of white in the air where she’d been.

When he can no longer hear them, Bit returns to his body. The stars are still out, the sky endlessly black. The stream gurgles. On the wind, there is the distant sound of cheering from the Sheep’s Meadow, the end of a song. He doesn’t think he saw what he saw. There is no way. It was, like everything else tonight, an alchemical reaction: desire poured from a great height into a beaker of fear.

And yet, he begins to run. He doesn’t believe; but he still has to find Hannah or Abe or Titus, someone who can do something, Handy, Astrid, a midwife, an adult, someone. Branches rake his cheeks. He trips and feels rips in his palms, warm blood spilling out of the bag of his skin. At last, out to the Pond, Arcadia House still very far. He has a stitch in his side, has to stop to breathe out his lungs.

When he stands, he is so tired that his limbs are made of stone. It is all he can do to keep trudging, step after step. He tries to focus, but he can’t remember now what he was afraid of. There were woods and people fucking, or the woods fucking itself. Stars and fucking and woods. He can’t quite figure it out. There was Helle, possibly. Or Pooh. Helle and the trees, Pooh and men? There was a yes? He wants to weep for the overwhelm that sucks him in, a quicksand. The word rape surfaces in his brain, hot and glowing, and he pushes it down again. It wasn’t. Still: not right. There is something wrong, and if he could ask Hannah, she would make it clear for him, make him understand what he doesn’t understand; he doesn’t believe his own nose, here, his hands, the hunger a purple spike in his belly. It vagues in and out, and he knows only that he has to find Hannah somewhere, Helle somewhere, Hannah, Helle, Hannah.

Bit passes an ember burning in the dark, which develops as he nears into Kaptain Amerika. The old Trippie singsongs as Bit passes,

Children born of fairy stock

Never need for shirt or frock,

Never want for food or fire,

Always get their heart’s desire.

The ember vanishes. Kaptain Amerika is moored in the shadows eddying behind Bit.

Almost to Arcadia House. Bit’s blood is weary. The air seems so heavy upon him. He is almost to his own bed. What if he dealt with everything tomorrow? His legs buckle, and he crawls through the apple terraces. The moon silvering the branches soothes him, and he lies and sleeps. He wakes to a hard green apple banging his temple, a misty dawn, and sits up, wracked with pain. The dew has crept into his joints. Somewhere he hears a strange sound, a clip-clop, and thinks of the choppers and stands to warn the rest of Arcadia, then falls again, dizzied. But there is nothing on the horizon save the sinking moon, and when he looks down he finds the source of the sound: an Amish buggy clipping around the gravel drive. He ekes his tender way down and stands where the horse comes to a halt. The beast’s sensitive nostrils dilate and prod at the air, smelling something strange in it: the bonfire, the wasted bodies, the chemicals coursing through thousands of bloodstreams, Bit’s own confusion.

Amos the Amish slides off the bench, face blank. Bit looks for irritation, but the man gives nothing away. He opens the buggy’s door, and out spill three Trippies: a man who wears a wedding dress; a plump woman whose brain has snailed into itself; Henry, who tried once to yank Midge’s tongue from her mouth because he believed it had turned into a rattlesnake. Of the fried ones, the man in the wedding dress is clearest.

What happened? Bit asks him, and the man shrugs. We tried to go, he says and shuffles off, his hem gliding gray in the dirt.

Where were you trying to go? he asks the woman, and she grunts and twists her face this way and that and says Kalamazooooooooooo, ending up with a hoot like an owl.

Henry says to his knees, No, no, no, no! Xanadu. And when Bit doesn’t understand, he says, Honeydew! Paradise of milk. Of paradise!

Bit says, Were you hungry? and both Trippies nod and look at him hopefully.

Where are your Minders? Bit says, and Henry shrugs.

Amos climbs back onto the bench and takes up the reins.

Thank you for bringing them back, sir, Bit says. I’m sorry if they bothered you.

But he will get nothing from the Amish man. Amos only clicks his tongue against his teeth, and the horse moves off. The plump woman strokes Bit’s cheek. Honey, she croons, stroking, smiling her brown teeth at him. Little little little little little honeydew.

Bit wakes, groggy, in the morning, to the sound of yelling and fast footsteps all over Arcadia House. His brain is very slow. He shuffles into the bright day, then cringes across the lawn and into the shadow of the Octagonal Barn. Ten thousand people, it seems, are milling about, shouting. Bit stumbles toward Sweetie, who is sobbing so hard Bit can barely make out what she’s telling Abe. Apparently, Bit gathers, an hour ago, when the Kid Herd went to the tomato patch to pluck tomatoes for dinner, one girl stepped on a hand. It seemed to be growing from the mud, a zombie claw. She touched it with a finger and called to Saucy Sally. Sally tracked the arm through the mud until she found a shoulder, a face, a pair of eyes, unblinking. She sent the kidlets screaming toward Arcadia House. When the AmbUnit went to collect the young man (corduroy jacket, hair shagged into his face, tanzanite class ring, purple lips), their attempts to revive him were hopeless. As soon as the ambulance reached the hospital, the police descended on Arcadia.

Abe puts his arms around Sweetie, and though she has to bend awkwardly, she sinks her face into his neck and blubbers there.

Bit looks out into the hubbub, a new panic surging in him. He sees the police beyond, so thick that, even with his muzzy head, Bit understands they had been waiting all weekend for exactly this. Some are state troopers. Most are town police. But there are so many. Some must have been borrowed from the bigger cities, Syracuse and Rochester, and maybe even Buffalo. He sees glee in their fleshy faces. They are a tornado, a mob. They tear down tents where people are sleeping, cut down hammocks, turn over everything in Ersatz Arcadia, looking for drugs. Men and women are shoved to the ground, cuffed. The six midwives have locked arms and so far have been successful at keeping the Pigs out of the Henhouse but are now being arrested for resisting arrest. The men go in, drag some of the pregnant girls out. Astrid stands alone, a rigid statue, daring them to look her in the face. None do.

The Pigs go into Arcadia House and come out with Harrison, bellowing, icy Midge. They come out with Hank and Horse, who are clean-living, who don’t do drugs.

Planted, someone mutters nearby.

Bit spins, squinting for Hannah; in a wave of despair, he remembers the pounds of weed she’d been holding. He closes his eyes and prays that she had given it all to the others to sell last night, that she is somewhere calm, on a hike in the woods. That, at the very least, Bit and his parents can find some way to escape together. There is a pressure on his shoulders, Helle grabbing him from behind, her arms around his neck and her smell of vanilla, her dreadlocks slithering over his shoulder. He sees Hannah beside the Bakery, shouting in the face of a boy-cop. He dissolves with relief and feels Helle’s warm breath in his ear, saying, Oh, God, Oh, God.

He is glad Helle can’t see his face. He is crying. Not because of the police, not for the dead boy, not for all the people he loves being yanked, bewildered, away. For Helle, for her thievery of Arcadia’s future, for what he remembers of the night before, the men in the leather jackets.

He can’t stand for her to touch him; he can’t shrug her off. He stands suffering her arms around him, unable, just yet, to comfort her. He watches Cole and Dylan holding hands, until he can bear to look at the scene again.

The rest of the Pregnant Ladies are running as fast as they can up to the Octagonal Barn. All together, shouting, they strip themselves naked, veiny and rashy and swollen, silvery with stretchmarks, each one with the most gorgeous breasts he has ever seen. Now everyone is shedding clothes. Helle’s arms cross as she lifts the hem of her shirt. Bit looks away, sick to death of it all.

Come on, Bit, Helle says, removing her arms from the buds on her chest, and he takes off his clothes, slowly, covering himself, afraid both of smallness and of sudden expansion. Ike runs up, grinning, and swings his dick so it flap-flap-flaps against his thighs.

None of this bothers the police at all. The ones who usually take photos of bodies are now snapping photos of the naked hippies. From afar, Bit can see the police in the Circenses Singers shed take out the papier-mâché puppets and slit them, looking for a stash, and Leif falls on his knees and rips at his white hair.

The crowd hushes: the police emerge from the Eatery with Handy, in a holey army shirt. His face is pillow-creased, drowsy as a koala’s, his hands are bunched at the wrist and cuffed. He is murmuring instructions to Fiona, who is walking beside him, her chestnut hair so filled with light it seems like it’s on fire.

Bit looks at Ike and Helle, frozen in the naked moil. Dad, screams Helle, and when Handy doesn’t look up, she screams, Handy! and Handy hears and searches for her. When he sees them, he gives both of his younger children a broad smile, that poor gray eyetooth flashing. I’ll be back, kids, don’t worry, he shouts. Handy is barefoot, in boxer shorts. The officer hits his head hard on the edge of the doorframe when he pushes him into the squad car.

One last pale wave in the window. Then the lead car pulls off, followed by the vans and buses they brought in to cart the people away. All that is left is a ring of yellow tape in the tomato patch, detectives still stomping the plants, Saucy Sally leaning against Titus, telling her story again, her newest baby as wide-eyed as a lemur in her sling.

Bit touches Helle’s thin arm, but now she shies away.

One hundred fifty-three were arrested for drug charges. Five for outstanding warrants. Twenty-six for resisting arrest. Fifteen minors, all runaways, sent back to their parents or juvenile court. Handy charged with fifteen counts of unlawfully harboring a minor. Twenty-four counts of aiding and abetting drug transactions. Five counts of possession. For the boy’s death, a count of criminally negligent manslaughter: Handy, at least nominally, owns Arcadia’s land. He allowed a party to happen at which drugs were freely available. Astrid goes to the courthouse and comes back at night, her face raw. She heads to the Biz Unit and makes a call on their telephone, and when she comes down to the Eatery, Leif and Helle and Ike are waiting for her. Around them, a protective shield has gathered: Hannah and Abe, Midge and Marilyn and Eden, Lila and Hiero, Sweetie and Cole and Dylan. Fiona, far from Astrid. Bit, of course.

Well, Astrid says. I have money for the bail. Handy’s, that’s all I could get. My mother, Margrete, in Norway. Old witch.

Helle says, Conditions?

There are always conditions with Margrete, Astrid sighs. One, I must divorce Handy, as she has always wished. And, two, you children go to her in Trondheim.

I’m not going, says Leif, his strange elfin face tight against its bones. I’d kill myself.

You are eighteen. You are not a child. It is your choice, Astrid snaps.

Me neither, Helle says, and Ike repeats.

Oh, yes, you are, Astrid says. Margrete always gets her way.

But what about Handy? says Ike, trying not to cry. It’s not fair.

Astrid strokes Ike’s fuzzy cropped head. She touches Helle’s face with both cupped hands. Handy wouldn’t want you to see the trial, all that. Norway will be good for you. There will be nobody to care for you here when Handy goes to jail.

The Eatery seems to grow so small it presses against their skin. In the weak light, every single one of them looks wan.

The visitors ebb away. Some of the Runaways leave with them, some of the Newbies. A number of Wolfs have encountered a number of Meadows and vanish into the sunset. Dorotka shocks them all. She finds a mate among the revelers at the concert, the dead boy in her garden proves the tipping point, and she packs a bag and, weeping in Polish, goes. As soon as she does, the aphids move in and coat the soy yellow.

Some of the charges are dropped. Most people make bail from outside Arcadia, but many are furious that the community to which they’d dedicated their lives wouldn’t bail them out. Whole families disappear into the night. There are beds open in the Ado Unit. Among the Old Arcadians who leave are Pooh and her mother, who vanish in the early morning after Cockaigne Day. Cole and Ike both look guilty when they hear the girl is gone.

Bit comes in from his Photography Tutorial with Mikele. He finds Hannah alone at a table in the Eatery, head in her hands. Hannah? Bit says. What’s wrong?

She stands, wordless, and leads him by the hand to the pantry. The shelves, which are usually stocked full, now shine, mostly bare. There is vegetable oil, white sugar, some spice.

We have no more food, Hannah says. We have tofu. And bread. And a few preserves from last season. We’re going to starve to death unless we come up with something. Nobody has sent back money from the Plot, and I don’t even know how much of it was confiscated.

Her voice, serrated, hits Bit in the gut. What about the Motor Pool? Bit says. Can’t they sell an extra car or something?

Extra? Hannah says. Have we ever had extra anything?

Pregnant Ladies and Trippies and mud, Bit says to make her laugh. He can’t help it: he thinks of Hannah’s secret cache, the miniatures in their frames, the Belgian lace, the tea set. As if she knows what he’s about to say, she says, There is only so much you can sell before you start to sell yourself.

What about sending Monkeypower out? he says, and she says, Bit, take a look at the fields. This morning we sent out a hundred of our best workers. That will feed all six hundred of us for a few days. Then, nothing.

Even when she walks back up to her room, Bit wants to call after her, Let me talk to Helle. Let me get back whatever weed she has left, or the money she made.

But he can’t: he can’t approach Helle without seeing the men in the trees, Helle’s face cometing off into the dark. He can’t go near. Helle first looks wounded at his coldness, then she too stays away.

Handy comes home on bail. Bit watches with Abe and Hannah from their bedroom window as he steps from the Chevrolet. He seems shrunken, and when Helle and Leif and Ike run to him at the bottom of the hill, they are all taller than their father.

Why is nobody else down there welcoming Handy back? Bit says.

We’re all fed up with Handy’s shit, Hannah says. I’m not the leader, but my word is your command. Everyone must work, but freeloaders are welcome in Arcadia. Fucking Cockaigne Day. A community based on work, but I get to spend all day up in my fancy room, high as a kite, sticking my dick into any of the chicks who will lay down in front of me.

Hannah, Abe says.

Hannah snaps, What? I know you think the same thing.

Yes, he says. I’ve never heard you say the word dick before. Cussing becomes you.

She says, Ha! and kisses him, very slowly, on the forehead.

Now she sits on the bed and says, Stone family meeting. Item one and only. Do we stay or do we go?

For an hour, they debate. Carefully, cautiously. With Handy out of the picture, they can change Arcadia; if they stay, they will have to shoulder the crippling debt. If everyone works their asses off, they can survive the winter; how can they work with so few people left? They love Arcadia with all their hearts; their hearts are so very tired.

They decide to not decide. They will stay, and if staying becomes unbearable, they will go.

Bit tries to wait for Helle at night. They have to talk, but she doesn’t come back from wherever she is disappearing to. In the mornings, he sits outside the room she shares with Jincy and Muffin, but she doesn’t emerge. She is a smooth white fish, darting away from him. He wakes at midnight shaking from another nightmare, and rises. The moon is full and cold. He tries to run but gives up, the rock in his stomach too heavy. He finds his way into the thick, watchful woods. There is the familiar press upon him, the eyes from the dark. The menace could kill him. He walks until he finds himself at Verda’s and knocks on her door. She is up sleepless also, making cornbread muffins. He sits at the woodstove in her blanket, Eustace curled around his feet. Verda reads him and says nothing. At last, after he has picked apart his muffin and held the tea until it is lukewarm, she says, Even when you think you can’t bear it, you can bear it.

He doesn’t say anything.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles, she says. Believe me. I have been where you are. This is something I do know.

In the morning, the Pink Piper roars to life. Peanut and Clay have spent all night getting it into working shape. Astrid is going back to the Midwifery School in Tennessee with all the Pregnant Ladies, the midwives. She and Handy have one last kiss on the porch. He says, I hate that this whole thing is over.

Still, there is — what? the release of losing? the hope in devastation? — in his face.

The lawyer will be in touch, you know, Astrid says.

She kisses her children. When Helle says, Take me with you, Astrid says, You must have your year in Norway. It will be grand for you. Margrete is very tough and will help you mend your ways, my girl. You are too wild.

Ike, unabashed, weeps, and Bit can do nothing but pat his shoulder until he calms.

When Astrid boards the bus, Lila goes with her. Hiero stays. Arcadia feels like a book with the pages ripped out, the cover loose in Bit’s hands.

Titus and his family drive off before lunch, cramped in a Volkswagen van that had been such a beater even the Motor Pool had left it for dead at one corner of the lot. It may be, Bit thinks, the van he was born in. Jincy and Wells hitch into Syracuse, but not before Jincy bends to hug Bit. I love you, she says. I’ll find you. At a loss, he kisses her hands again and again, his wild-haired sister. Muffin goes with her mothers, screaming. The Free Store is unmonitored for two days until Abe presses people into shifts there, and in that time, things are taken from the shelves with nothing to replace them. Good things: knives and pouches of tobacco, candy bars and handkerchiefs, handmade pillows and afghans, gone. They wake to find more people missing. Tarzan. Peanut. Clay. Harrison, whose charges are dropped. More and more, faster and faster. The Ado Unit echoes, rooms empty. Only two hundred people eat supper that night.

Handy disappears the afternoon he is supposed to return for his trial. For hours, Cole and Bit and Dylan talk over Handy’s flight through Vermont, up into Canada, growing breathless at the thought of his being an outlaw. But Helle and Ike trail back into the Common Room at midnight, limp. With a weary air, Helle says, I drove us. And we went all the way to Niagara Falls after we dropped him off, just to see the waterfall.

They stare at her. You took Handy to Canada? Cole says.

I wanted to keep going to Canada, says Ike. But he insisted on going to the jail.

And you know what he said? Helle says. Right as he got out of the car? He said, Be good, kiddos, that’s what he said.

There was no Stay strong, and brave, my beautiful children. No I love you, Ike says, trying to make a joke of it.

Helle looks at her brother with Astrid’s cold eyes. That’s because he doesn’t, she says.

Bit grabs Helle’s hand as she stands to go to bed with the other girls. She sits back down beside him and watches the doors close. You’re mad at me, she says when they are alone.

I am, he says. He means, he thinks, stealing the marijuana; but when he says it, he sees the pool of darkness, the bodies silvered with moonlight.

She opens her mouth, she closes it again. When she speaks, she seems unstuffed, a pillow that has lost its feathers. I thought you knew who I was. I’m so sorry, Bit, she whispers. I didn’t know you thought we were together like that.

Together? he says.

She frowns. Isn’t that what you mean? Me with other boys.

No, he says, though his heart mutters, Liar.

What, then? she says.

The pot, he says. That you stole. That we couldn’t fucking sell, Helle, and now we’re as poor as ever. You’re the only one I told.

She hunches her thin shoulders up until her neck is gone. She closes her eyes and seems to shrink. When she pulls herself to standing, she says, Does it really even matter? I mean, she says, gesturing out at Arcadia with both hands, does it? In the end?

Bit is on the rock in the Pond as the other Ados dabble in the too-warm water. He feels old. The spores of milkweed gust in on the wind and fold themselves flat when they touch the surface. On boulders a hundred feet away, Armand Hammer sits, king of the Runaways. His buddies strip off, dive into the pond. Alone, he pulls from a knapsack at his feet the biggest plastic bag of marijuana Bit has ever seen. Armand sees Bit looking and grins, his upper lip touching the nail that sticks through his nose.

Want some? Armand calls out. Ten bucks for the whole bag. I got a shitload more in the woods.

Where did you get that? Bit says.

Armand shrugs and says, Someone told me some asshole was using the Sugarshack to cure it. And so I helped myself.

It’s not yours, Bit says.

Armand says, What’s your deal, man? It’s a fucking commune, it’s everyone’s.

Bit doesn’t know how he gets from his rock to Armand’s so fast. He doesn’t know how hard a face can feel against a hand, how teeth can split a fist, how fury can make even Bit, a half a head smaller than Armand and forty pounds lighter, the stronger boy. He hits until something goes loose in his head, and he flies backward, a trickle forming in his eyes, and he sees Cole and Ike and Dylan and Harrison and Fiona come sealing wetly up out of the water, hopeless skinny hippie kids about to get knocked off their blocks. From where he lies in the cool space between two boulders, Bit sees Helle standing, white and apart, not even looking at the fracas. She is looking only at Bit. She bends as if from a great height, and he closes his eyes to feel her fingers on his face.

Bit takes a trash bag of weed to Hannah and Abe’s room. His mother is sitting on her bed, hands between her legs, looking heavy. He puts the bag on the bed beside her, and when she looks up, she takes in his split knuckles, his bloody head, the eyes squeezing shut under their bruises. She kisses his hurt hands. Thank you, she says, but she’s not smiling.

Now we can sell it, Hannah, he says. We can pay our debt.

For a long while she says nothing, and when she speaks, it’s in a whisper that he has to lean closely to hear. Too little, she says. Too late.

In the night there is the sound of breaking glass on the first floor. In the morning, they find the windows of the Eatery smashed out and down the hill the Runaway Quonset kicked down. It looks like a tornado went through it, Cole reports. Sheets and cots and mattresses all split and twisted and wet. All of the Runaways are gone. Soon, the Trippies vanish, most of the Newbies go home, or to other communes, hitching to cities, rejoining the world.

Ike is not in their room. Cole and Bit search the Pond, the Bakery with its few loaves of golden bread, the Soy Dairy, the Octagonal Barn, the Showerhouse. They walk the fields for him, check the Gatehouse, where Titus’s old badger smell still hangs in the air.

At last, Cole says, Waterfall, and he and Bit check the sun. If they start now and trot, they can make it there and back before dark. Bit has matches in his pocket. Cole has a little gorp in a paper bag.

They go through the forests, through the afternoon. They stop once for wild blackberries that stain their teeth and hands, and keep on. At last, they hear the tremendous pour. The air goes clammy, plants grow up the length of trees, rocks they’re jogging over turn slippery. Around the bend and there it is, the tallest thing Bit has seen, forty feet of falling water. It surprises him every time, its power and spin and foam, the deafening crash and split of the water on the rocks. The lick of the ferns in the misted air. The strange, kind softness of the very atmosphere. A pulse of pleasure goes through Bit that ends with tears shivering in his eyes and a hurried swipe with his sleeve.

Cole and Bit scale the cliff, clutching at roots and ferns, and heave themselves over the edge. Ike is sitting in his jeans in the shallow water, five feet from the drop. They pick their way to him carefully: the current is strong enough to carry them over the edge. In more carefree times, when they jumped into the pool, they had to aim with precision or their bodies would smash into the rocks below. They sit on either side of Ike, who says nothing. The skin of his arms is bluish and pocked with goosebumps. Bit wonders how long he has been sitting here.

Above the treetops, the sky turns woolly, a slick dark silver. Sun pokes through holes in the cloud cover and fingers the distant ground. Bit feels prickles behind his ears, as if he’s being watched. A bobolink calls. A doe steps to the pool below, and after a moment, so do her fawns.

Ike says, They don’t want me. None of them. My parents.

This is not the time to lie, and the boys say nothing. For a long time they sit like this, together, in the rush of the stream and watch the water anneal at the edge, hear it break upon itself below.

They come out when Ike is shuddering with cold, and Bit makes as grand a fire as he can. Ike clutches his bare legs to his chest, his pants steaming in the heat. He pulls a little bag of weed from his shirt pocket, and Cole gets busy with it.

The daylight emerges for one last breath, syruping the valley. There is a movement in the trees, and they look up with alarm, thinking bears, when two boys step out onto the bank. They aren’t Arcadians: they’re wearing overalls and linen blouses, and are as tall as Cole and broad in the shoulders. One throws the stick he’s been peeling into the fire with a shy underhanded toss. The other crouches down. Bit is alert, wary, waiting for a sudden move.

But the first boy just says Hi? and Cole lets out a snoutful of smoke and says, Heya.

Heya, the other one repeats. He is dark-haired and younger than his brother.

No English, the first says, the one with a gap between his teeth. Amos boys? Amos Two, John, he says, pointing at himself, his brother.

Oh, dig, yeah, Cole says. We know Amos. He’s cool. You’re his sons.

The crouching boy looks at the roach going to Bit’s mouth. Bit inhales, considers, offers it to him.

The boy takes a big lungful and begins to hack it out. Cole grins at him, and Bit hides his laugh in a fist, and then the young one steps forward and takes a big inhale, and lets it out, coughing only a little.

Bit watches the sturdy boys with their square faces and knuckles. The Oldest Utopianists, Hannah said once, watching the Amish men who came to help with the harvest: for generations, they’ve lived the most perfect lives they can believe in. Bit imagines meals of animal flesh and hard chores and a huge family and girl cousins in demure frocks. What a relief it would be to live always among family. To be among people who all look like you, think like you, behave like you, have the same God to love and fear, a God angry enough to smite and loving enough to give, a God with an ear big enough to hold the secrets you whisper into it, who lets you empty yourself and walk back into your life, infinitely lighter. He feels loss for something he’s never known.

They sit, companionably, passing the joint. The world darkens more. At some signal, the Amish boys stand and nod at the Arcadians and disappear into the woods, back toward their safe, solid houses, back to their families.

Ike puts on his dryish pants, Cole kicks dirt over the embers of the fire. They begin to walk fast, homeward. Bit holds his words in for as long as Ike needs him to. They are halfway home before Ike looks at his friends. His face is baggy; for miles, his stomach has been audibly rumbling.

Those Amish dopes were so fucking weird, Ike says and begins to laugh.

Cole gives his little whinny. Bit finds himself laughing, too, laughing and laughing until tears spring to his eyes and he has to lean against a tree to stop it, or he will piss. When they’re quiet, the boys look helplessly at one another. They feel tired in their very bones.

Those mofos, Cole says. They’re even weirder than we’re going to be out in the real world.

Bit begins to shiver, though they are going quickly enough to warm themselves. He feels sick, wants to break into a trot, a gallop, a sprint. He cannot imagine himself in the Outside. Because, he can admit it now, no matter how he strains his brain, he cannot imagine the greater world at all. He is not ready.

Night has fallen when they come up into the Eatery. They have missed their dinner. The kitchen is dark and empty. But they find a note on the stainless-steel counter: Hannah had saved plates in the oven and a whole loaf of bread, just for them. Bit hides the note in his pocket so Ike won’t see how his mother wrote I love you at the bottom and feel his own lack.

They are just finished when Helle comes into the kitchen, her cheeks glassy. Ike, she whispers, Margrete’s here.

In blows an old woman, straight and white, Astrid but smaller, the air around her dense. There is a power to her. A witchiness. Her mouth telegraphs rules, hard chairs, cold-water showers, feline familiars with bladder troubles. You come now, Isaac, she says in Astrid’s accent, comically exaggerated.

Ike stands and towers over his grandmother. She pats his cheek and goes out. Air returns to the room.

Ike says, I’m not saying goodbye. Goodbye means never again, and I’ll see you in weeks. Months, at most. He turns his back on his friends and rushes out.

Helle hugs Cole for a long time, too long, Bit thinks. When she comes to hug Bit, he drowns in her vanilla, her dreads making a tent around his face. Her retainer is a flash on her tongue. He has grown, he sees with a startle: he can almost see level into her golden eyes.

Don’t forget, she says, leaning her forehead against his. Me.

I couldn’t, he says.

If you do, it’ll be like I’ve never existed at all.

He’s all knotted up. She kisses him, sharp of teeth, touch of tongue, hands cold on the back of his neck. He wants to tell her so much that he can’t say anything; if he does, he will spill out onto the ground. She holds his hand and Cole’s as they go down the slate steps to the car waiting on the gravel. Before she turns, he pulls out the photograph he’s been carrying in a plastic bag, pinned to the inside of his shorts. He puts it in her hand. It is Helle at the Pond, so early in the morning she thought she was alone, standing naked on the rock, reflected in the glassy water. A taper with a shock of blond dreadlocks at each end, so beautiful, beauty was no longer the word for it. She looks at the picture and winces; she braves a look at his face, and with a terrifying swoop in the chest, he knows she understands. Ike has a pillow over his eyes and won’t look when they knock on the glass.

Helle gets in, the car gentles off. Out of the darkness at the edge of the wood there steps a giant, which is caught now in the headlights and shines. It is an old man, comically bug-eyed, fork-bearded, with bendy spaghetti arms. It waves and bows in graceful, almost human movements. When the car passes beyond and the darkness steals back out from where it had hidden at the edge of the woods, Bit sees Leif under the puppet, still dancing in the dark.

They are one hundred. Regina and Ollie bought a truck in Ilium, a beautiful, sleek Ford with a huge bed. They go to the Bakery in the middle of the night and take the industrial mixers and one of the ovens before anyone has time to stop them. The next day, two old people in a Jaguar show up for Scott and Lisa, and before they are allowed in the car, they must take off their Arcadia clothes and put on new ones, khakis and a button-up shirt and blazer for Scott, a dress and panty hose for Lisa. Bit watches, heartstruck, as Scott and Lisa climb into the backseat and hold hands, and smile uncomfortably at their knees as the driver in his boat shoes and golf pants roars at them, choleric, speeding off.

Hannah says, I always suspected they were secret Republicans.

They were your friends, Bit says.

Friends, Hannah says. What a word.

There are sixty left. The tomatoes rot on the vine.

The toilets back up in Arcadia House, and there is no Horse or Hank to fix them. The smell drives out thirty Arcadians. Hannah makes dinner by herself, out of what they have: tempeh from the freezer, a few cans of beans, some boiled cabbage.

The next day, Sweetie comes to the Ado Unit, trailing Dyllie. His little face is electric with nerves. He is pale, almost as pale as his brother. Sweetie seems heavy with her sorrow and runs her hands over Cole’s head, the hair sparking with static electricity under her palms. We’re going, Cole, she says. A girlfriend of mine’s going to take us to the city.

Down at the car, Cole and Dylan hug Bit wordlessly and get in. The car moves off. After his friends have gone, the sound of a woodpecker in the forest redoubles, festive as castanets. There is a puncture in the world, and everything Bit knew about himself is escaping.

Hannah wakes him in the night. Baby, she murmurs in his ear. Grab your things.

He has kept a brown bag under his bunk for a week now and takes it out, and climbs out of bed, full-clothed. When he stands up, Hannah is already gone. He catches her on the spiral staircase and sees something hard shimmering on her face.

Out into the cool. Down the slate steps. He cannot look back; he knows what happens when one does. There is a car coughing on the drive, a junky Pinto. Abe already sits in the front seat, his wheelchair strapped to the trunk. The family’s few effects are on the backseat, in a box. Bit knows that the faceless cloth babydoll on top, an Amish gift, is stuffed with high-grade bud.

Hannah closes the door and puts the car in gear. The forest is hunched as they slide past, the Gatehouse is dark. The County Road curves to the path that pushes out to Verda lonely in her stone cottage. There, Hannah turns off the engine, and Bit and she climb out (the cherries in full fruit over the night-darkened door making all slick underfoot). Eustace gives a desultory woof, and Verda emerges in a white nightgown, holding her rifle on her shoulder. Slowly, she lowers it.

Oh, she says. The day is come.

I’m sorry, Hannah says in a whisper.

Verda disappears inside. She comes back out with a bundle she places into Bit’s hand. I won’t see you again, Ridley, she says. He hugs her fragile bones. Hannah steps up and hugs her too, and Verda says, Go along then. Her hair blazes in the headlights, but her eyes are only sockets as they pull away.

Bit unwraps the bundle. In it is a bag of rosehip tea, a four-inch thickness of papers bound with a ribbon, the scrimshaw, a wad of cash as soft as mouse fur. He hands the papers to Hannah, who pats them and returns her hand to the wheel, and the money to Abe, who gives a whistle. Bit holds the scrimshaw, feeling the fine carvings with the pads of his fingers until he has memorized the shape of the face repeated in the bone.

He leans his head against the cool window. The same moon hovers. A line flaps with sheets, a mailbox shines. The road passes beyond everything he knows of it. They go around a bend he has never been around, a house he has never seen; all is doubly new, sick with newness. A bridge made of steel; an ice cream parlor; cows, much larger than what he’d imagined cows to be. A sidewalk, a flag on a pole. A brick school. A Ferris wheel. The endless hills, heaped and sleeping.

The sun rises. In the window, it reflects him back to himself. There is so little to Bit: a fine hem of gold hair, the filthy neck of a teeshirt. Fragile, pale flesh over a sharpness of bone, and eyes so vast in his face they threaten to swallow the world just now spinning past, threaten to be swallowed by it.