Vampires in the Lemon Grove

The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979

The gulls landed in Athertown on July 11, 1979. Clouds of them, in numbers unseen since the ornithologists began keeping records of such things. Scientists all over the country hypothesized about erratic weather patterns and redirected migratory routes. At first sullen Nal barely noticed them. Lost in his thoughts, he dribbled his basketball up the boardwalk, right past the hundreds of gulls on Strong Beach, gulls grouped so thickly that from a distance they looked like snowbanks. Their bodies capped the dunes. If Nal had looked up, he would have seen a thunderhead of seagulls in the well of the sky, rolling seaward. Instead, he ducked under the dirty turquoise umbrella of the Beach Grub cart and spent his last dollar on a hamburger; while he struggled to open a packet of yellow mustard, one giant gull swooped in and snatched the patty from its bun with a surgical jerk. Nal took two bites of bread and lettuce before he realized what had happened. The gull taunted him, wings akimbo, on the Beach Grub umbrella, glugging down his burger. Nal went on chewing the greasy bread, concluding that this was pretty much par for his recent course.

All summer long, since his mother’s termination, Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails — and then right at his nadir, he’d agreed to an “avant” haircut performed by Cousin Steve. Cousin Steve was participating in a correspondence course with a beauty school in Nevada, America, and to pass his Radical Metamorphosis II course, he decided to dye Nal’s head a vivid blue and then razor the front into tentacle-like bangs. “Radical,” Nal said drily as Steve removed the foil. Cousin Steve then had to airmail a snapshot of Nal’s ravaged head to the United States desert, $17.49 in postage, so that he could get his diploma. In the photograph, Nal looks like he is going stoically to his death in the grip of a small blue octopus.

Samson Wilson, Nal’s brother, took his turn in Cousin Steve’s improvised barber chair — a wrecked church pew that Steve had carted into his apartment from off the street. Cousin Steve used Samson as a guinea pig for “Creative Clippers.” He gave Samson a standard buzz cut to start, but that looked so good that he kept going with the razor. Pretty soon Samson had a gleaming cue ball head. He’d cracked jokes about the biblical significance of this, and Nal had secretly hoped that his brother’s power over women would in fact be diminished. But to Nal’s dismay, the ladies of Athertown flocked to Samson in greater multitudes than before. Girls trailed him down the boardwalk, clucking stupidly about the new waxy sheen to his head. Samson was seventeen and had what Nal could only describe as a bovine charm: he was hale and beefy, with a big laugh and the deep serenity of a grazing creature. Nal loved him, too, of course — it was impossible not to — but he was baffled by Sam’s ease with women, his ease in the world.

That summer Nal was fourteen and looking for excuses to have extreme feelings about himself. He and Samson played a lot of basketball on summer nights and weekends. Nal would replay every second of their games until he was so sick of his own inner sportscaster that he wanted to puke. He actually had puked once — last September he had walked calmly out of the JV try-outs and retched in the frangipani. The voice in his head logged every on-court disaster, every stolen ball and missed shot, the unique fuckups and muscular failures that he had privately termed “Nal-fouls.” Samson had been on the varsity team since his freshman year, and he wasn’t interested in these instant replays — he wanted the game to move forward. Nal and his brother would play for hours, and when he got tired of losing, Nal would stand in the shade of a eucalyptus grove and dribble in place.

“It’s just a pickup game, Nal,” Samson told him.

“Quit eavesdropping on me!” Nal shouted, running the ball down the blacktop. “I’m talking to myself.”

Then he’d take off sprinting down the road, but no matter how punishing the distance he ran — he once dribbled the ball all the way down to the ruined industrial marina at Pier 12, where the sea rippled like melted aluminum — Nal felt he couldn’t get away from himself. He sank hoops and it was always Nal sinking them; he missed, and he was Nal missing. He felt incapable of spontaneous action: before he could do anything, a tiny homunculus had to generate a flowchart in his brain. If p, then q; If z, then back to a. This homunculus could gnaw a pencil down to a nub, deliberating. All day, he could hear the homunculus clacking in his brain like a secretary from a 1940s movie: Nal shouldn’t! Nal can’t! Nal won’t! and then hitting the bell of the carriage return. He pictured the homunculus as a tiny, blankly handsome man in a green sweater, very agreeably going about his task of wringing the life from Nal’s life.

He wanted to get to a place where he wasn’t thinking about every movement at every second; where he wasn’t even really Nal any longer but just weight sinking into feet, feet leaving the pavement, fingers fanning forcelessly through air, the swish! of a made basket and the net birthing the ball. He couldn’t remember the last time he had acted without reservation on a single desire. Samson seemed to do it all the time. Once, when Nal returned home from his miles-long run with the ball, sweating and furious, they had talked about his aspiration for vacancy — the way he wanted to be empty and free. He’d explained it to Samson in a breathless rush, expecting to be misunderstood.

“Sure,” Samson said. “I know what you’re talking about.”

“You do?”

“From surfing. Oh, it’s wild, brother.” Why did Samson have to know him so well? “The feeling of being part of the same wave that’s lifting you. It’s like you’re coasting outside of time, outside your own skin.”

Nal felt himself redden. Sometimes he wished his brother would simply say, “No, Nal, what the hell do you mean?” Samson had a knack for this kind of insight: he was like a grinning fisherman who could wrench a secret from the depths of your chest and dangle it in front of you, revealing it to be nothing but a common, mud-colored fish.

“You know what else can get you there, Nal, since you’re such a shitty athlete?” Samson grinned and cocked his thumb and his pinky, tipped them back. “Boozing. Or smoking. Last night I was out with Vanessa and we were maybe three pitchers in when the feeling happened. All night I was in love with everybody.”

So Samson was now dating Vanessa Grigalunas? Nal had been infatuated with her for three years and had been so certain, for so long, that they were meant to be together, he was genuinely confused by this development, as if the iron of his destiny had gone soft and pliant as candle wax. Vanessa was in Nal’s grade, a fellow survivor of freshman year. He had sat behind her in Japanese class and it was only in that language — where he was a novice and felt he had license to stammer like a fool — that he could talk to her. “K-k-k,” he’d say. Vanessa would smile politely as he revved his stubborn syllable engine, until he was finally able to sputter out a “Konnichiwa.”

Nal had never breathed a word about his love for Vanessa to anyone. And then in early June, out of the clear blue, Samson began raving about her. “Vanessa Grigalunas? But … why her?” Nal asked, thinking of all the hundreds of reasons that he’d by now collected. It didn’t seem possible that the desire to date Vanessa could have co-evolved in Samson. Vanessa wasn’t his type at all; Samson usually dated beach floozies, twentysomethings with hair like dry spaghetti, these women he’d put up with because they bought him liquor and pot, who sat on his lap in Gerlando’s, Athertown’s only cloth-napkin restaurant, and cawed laughter. Vanessa’s hair shone like a lake. Vanessa read books and moved through the world as if she were afraid that her footsteps might wake it.

“I can’t stop thinking about her,” Samson grinned, running a paw over his bald head. “It’s crazy, like I caught a Vanessa bug or something.”

Nal nodded miserably — now he couldn’t stop thinking about the two of them together. He sketched out interview questions in his black composition notebook that he hoped to one day ask her:

1. What is it that you like about my brother? List three things (not physical).

2. What made you want to sleep with my brother? What was your thought in the actual moment when you decided? Was it a conscious choice, like, Yes, I will do this! or was it more like collapsing onto a sofa?

3. Under what circumstances can you imagine sleeping with me? Global apocalypse? National pandemic? Strep throat shuts down the high school? What if we were to do it immediately after I’d received a lethal bite from a rattlesnake so you could feel confident that I would die soon and tell no one? Can you just quantify for me, in terms of beer, what it would take?

It made Nal sadder still that even Vanessa’s mom, Mrs. Grigalunas — a woman who had no sons of her own and who treated all teenage boys like smaller versions of her husband — even kindly, delusional Mrs. Grigalunas recognized Nal as a deterrent to love. One Saturday night Samson informed him that the three of them would be going on a date to Strong Beach together; they needed Nal’s presence to reassure Mrs. Grigalunas that nothing dangerous or fun would happen.

“Yes, you two can go to the beach,” she told Vanessa, “but bring that Nal along with you. He’s such a nice boy.”

WHAT WERE all these seagulls doing out flying at night? They were kelp gulls, big ones. Nal was shocked to see how many of the birds now occupied Strong Beach. Where’d they all come from? He turned to point out the seagull invasion to Vanessa and Samson, but they were strolling hand in hand over a tall dune, oblivious to both Nal and the gulls’ wheeling shadows. Nal hoped the flock would leave soon. He was trying to finish a poem. White globs of gull shit kept falling from the sky, a cascade that Nal found inimical to his writing process. The poem that Nal was working on had nothing to do with his feelings — poetry, he’d decided, was to honor remote and immortal subjects, like the moon. “Lambent Planet, Madre Moon” was the working title of this one, and he’d already jotted down three sestets. Green nuclei of fireflies, Nal wrote. The red commas of two fires. A putrid, stinky blob fell from above and put out his word. “Shoo, you shit balloons!” he yelled as the gulls rained on.

There were no fireflies on the beach that night, but there were plenty of spider fleas, their abdomens pulsing with low-grade toxins. The air was tangy and cold. Between two lumps of sand about a hundred yards behind him, Vanessa and Nal’s brother, Samson, were … Nal couldn’t stand to think about it. In five minutes’ time they had given up on keeping their activities a secret from him, or anybody. Vanessa’s low moan was rising behind him, rich and feral and nothing like her classroom whisper.

Nal felt a little sick.

What on earth was the moon like? he wondered, squinting. What did the moon most resemble to him? Nal wiped at his dry eyes and dug into the paper. One of the seagulls had settled on an auburn coil of seaweed a few feet away from his bare foot. He tried to ignore it, but the gull was making a big production out of eviscerating a cigarette. It drew out red flakes of tobacco with its pincerlike bill and ate them. Perfect, Nal thought. Here I am trying to eulogize Mother Nature and this is the scene she presents me with.

Behind him, Samson growled Vanessa’s name. Don’t look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot. But Nal couldn’t help himself. He lacked the power to look away, but he never worked up the annihilating courage to look directly at them either; instead, he angled his body and let his eyes slide to the left. This was like taking dainty sips of poison. Samson’s broad back had almost completely covered Vanessa — only her legs were visible over the dune, her pink feet twitching as if she were impatient for sleep. “Oh!” said Vanessa, over and over again. “Oh!” She sounded happy, astonished.

Nal was a virgin. He kicked at a wet clump of sand until it exploded. He went on a rampage, doing whirling karate kicks into a settlement of abandoned sand castles along the beach for a full minute before he paused, panting, to recover himself. The tide rushed icy fingers of water up the beach and covered Nal’s foot.

“Ahh!” Nal cried into one of the troughs of silence between Samson and Vanessa’s moans. He had wandered to the water’s edge, six or seven dunes away from them. His own voice was drowned out by the ocean. The salt water sleuthed out cuts on his legs that he had forgotten about or failed to feel until now, and he almost enjoyed the burning. He looked around for something else to kick, but only one turret remained on the beach, a bucket-shaped stump in the middle of damp heaps. The giant seagull was standing beside it. Up close the gull seemed as large as a house cat. Its white face was luminous, its wings ink-dipped; its beak was fixed in that perennial shit-eating grin of all shearwaters and frigate birds.

“What are you grinning at?” Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle — too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape — and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal’s shadow and was pulling his darkness from him.

NAL WASN’T SUPPOSED to be in town that summer. He had been accepted to LMASS, the Lake Marion Achievement Summer Seminars: a six-week precollege program for the top three percent of the country’s high school students. It was a big deal — seniors who completed all four summers of the program were automatically admitted to Lake Marion College with a full scholarship package. “Cream Rises” was the camp’s motto; their mascot was an oblong custard-looking thing, the spumy top layer of which Nal guessed was meant to represent the gifted. In March a yellow T-shirt with this logo had arrived in the mail, bundled in with his acceptance letter. Nal tried to imagine a hundred kids wearing the same shirt in the Lake Marion dormitories, kids with overbites and cowlicks and shy, squint-eyed ambitions — LMASS! he thought, a kind of heaven. Had he worn the shirt with the custard-thing to his own school, it would have been a request for a punch in the mouth.

But then one day his mom came home from work and said she was being scapegoated by the Paradise Nursing Facility for what management was calling “a distressing oversight.” Her superiors recommended that she not return to work. But for almost two weeks Nal’s mother would set her alarm for five o’clock, suit up, take the number 14 bus to Paradise. Only after she was officially terminated did she file for unemployment, and so far as Nal could tell this was the last real action she had taken; she’d been on their couch for three months now and counting. Gradually she began to lose her old habits, as if these, too, were a uniform that she could slip out of: she stopped cooking entirely, slept at odd hours, mummied herself in blankets in front of their TV. What was she waiting for? There was something maddening about her posture — the way she sat there with one ear cocked sideways as if listening for a break in the weather. Nal had been forced to forfeit his deposit at Lake Marion and interview for a job behind the register at Penny’s Grocery. He took a pen to the Help Wanted ads and papered their fridge with them. This was back in April, when he’d still believed his mom might find another job in time to pay the Lake Marion fee.

“Mom, just look at these, okay?” he’d shout above the surf roar of their TV. “I circled the good ones in green.” She’d explain again without looking over that the whole town was against her. Nobody was going to hire Claire Wilson now. All these changes came about as the result of a single failed mainstay. The windows at Paradise were supposed to be fitted with a stop screw, to prevent what the Paradise manual euphemistically referred to as “elopement.” Jailbreak was another word for this, suicide, accidental defenestration — as Nal’s mom put it, many of the residents were forty-eight cards to a deck and couldn’t be trusted with their own lives. With the stop screws in place, no window opened more than six inches. But as it happened, a stop screw was missing from a sixth-floor window — one of the hundred-plus windows in Paradise — an oversight that was discovered when a ninety-two-year-old resident shoved it open to have a smoke. A visitor found the old woman leaning halfway out the window and drew her back inside the frame. The visitor described the “near fatal incident” to Nal’s mother while the “victim” plucked ash from her tongue. According to Nal’s mom, the Paradise administrators came to the sudden agreement that it had always been Claire Wilson’s responsibility to check the window locks. She came home that night babbling insincere threats: “They try to pin this on me, boys, you watch, I will quit in a heartbeat.” But then the resident’s daughter wrote a series of histrionic letters to the newspaper, and the sleepy Athertown news station decided to do an “exposé” of Paradise, modeled on the American networks, complete with a square-jawed black actress to play the role of Nal’s mother.

Only Nal had watched the dramatization through to its ending. They’d staged a simulation of a six-story fall using a flour sack dummy, the sack splitting open on the gates and spilling flour everywhere, powdering the inscrutable faces of the stone angels in the garden below. Lawsuits were filed, and, in the ensuing din of threats and accusations, Nal’s mother was let go.

Nal had expected his mom to react to this with a froth and vengeance that at least matched his own, perhaps even file a legal action. But she returned home from her final day at work exhausted. Her superiors had bullied her into a defeated sort of gratitude: “They said it was my job, who knows? I’m not perfect. I’m just glad they caught the problem when they did,” she kept saying.

“Quit talking like that!” Nal moaned. “It wasn’t your fault, Mom. You’ve been brainwashed by these people. Don’t be such a pushover.”

“A pushover!” she said. “Who’s pushing me over? I know it wasn’t my fault, Nal. I can’t be grateful that nobody got killed?” She described the “averted tragedy” in the canned language of the Paradise directors: the chance of one of her charges flailing backward out the window and onto the gate’s tiny spears. In her dreams the victim wasn’t a flour sack dummy but a body with no face, impaled on the spikes.

“That’s your body, Ma!” Nal cried. “That’s you!” But she didn’t see it that way.

“Let’s just be thankful nobody was hurt,” she mumbled.

Nal didn’t want his mom to relinquish her first fury. “How can you say that? They fired you, Mom! Now everything’s … off course.”

His mom stroked a blue curl of Nal’s hair and gave him a tired smile. “Ooh, we’re off course, right. I forgot. And what course was that?”

Nal picked up more shifts at the grocery store. He ran eggs and pork tenderloins down the register, the scanner catching his knuckles in a web of red light. Time felt heavy inside Penny’s. Beep! he whimpered along with the machine, swiping a tin of tomatoes. Beep! Sometimes he could still feel the progress of his lost future inside him, the summer at Lake Marion piping like a vacant bubble through his blood.

“Mom, can I still go away to college, though?” he asked her one Sunday, when they were sitting in the aquarium light of the TV. He’d felt the bubble swell to an unbearable pressure in his lungs. “Sure,” she said, not looking over from the TV. Her eyes were like Samson’s, bright splashes of blue in an oak-stained face. “You can do whatever you want.”

When the bubble in him would burst, Nal would try to start a fight. He shouted that what she called his “choices” about college and LMASS and Penny’s Grocery were her consequences, a domino run of misfortune. He told her that he wouldn’t be able to go to college if she didn’t find another job, that it was lying to pretend he could.

“I heard you guys going at it,” Samson said later in the kitchen, clapping mayonnaise onto two slices of bread. “Give Mom a break, kid. I think she’s sick.”

But Nal didn’t think that his mom had contracted any particular illness — he was terrified that she was more generally dying, or disintegrating, letting her white roots grow out and fusing her spine to their couch. She was still sitting in front of the TV with the shades drawn when he got off his shift at six thirty.

Nal wrote a poem about how his mother had become the sea hum inside the conch shell of their living room. He thought it must be the best poem he’d ever written because he tried to recite it to his bathroom reflection and his throat shut, and his eyes stung so badly he could barely see his own face. She was sitting out there now, watching TV reruns and muttering under her breath. Samson was out drinking that night with Vanessa. Nal gave his mother the poem to read and found it under a dirty mug, accumulating rings, when he came back to check on her that Friday.

Nal got a second job housesitting for his high school science teacher, Mr. McGowen, who was going to Lake Marion to teach an advanced chemistry course. Now Nal spent his nights in the shell of Mr. McGowen’s house. Each week Mr. McGowen sent him a check for fifty-six dollars, and his mom lived on this income plus the occasional contribution from Samson, wads of cash that Sam had almost certainly borrowed from someone else. “It helps,” she said, “it’s such a help,” and whenever she said this Nal felt his guts twist. Mr. McGowen’s two-room rental house was making slow progress down the cliffs; another hurricane would finish it. The move there hadn’t mattered in any of the ways that Nal had hoped it would. Samson had buffaloed him into giving him a spare key, and now Nal would wake up to find his brother standing in the umbilical hallway between the two rooms at odd hours:

SUNDAY: “How you living, Nal? Living easy? Easy living? You get paid yet this week? I need you to do me a solid, brotherman …” He was already peeling the bills out of Nal’s wallet.

MONDAY: “Cable’s out. I want to watch the game tonight, so I’ll probably just crash here …”

TUESDAY: “You’re out of toilet paper again. I fucking swear, I’m going to get a rash from coming over here! Some deadly fucking disease …”

WEDNESDAY: “Shit, kid, you need to get to the store. Your fridge is just desolate. What have you been eating?”

For three days, Nal hadn’t ingested anything besides black coffee and a pint of freezer-burned ice cream. Weight was tumbling from his body. Nal was living on liquid hatred now.

“Hey, Nal,” said Samson, barging through the door. “Listen, Vanessa and I were sort of hoping we could spend the night here? She lied and told Mrs. Griga-looney that she’s crashing at a friend’s spot. Cool? Although you should really pick up before she gets here, this place is gross.”

“Cool,” Nal said, his blue hair igniting in the flashing light of the TV. “I just did laundry. Fresh sheets for you guys.” Nal left Samson to root around the empty fridge and fished clean sheets out of Mr. McGowen’s dryer. He made the twin bed with hospital corners, pushed his sneakers and sweaty V-necks under the frame, filled two glasses at the sink faucet and set them on the nightstand. He lit Mr. McGowen’s orange emergency candles to provide a romantic accent. Nal knew this was not the most excellent strategy to woo Vanessa — making the bed so that she could sleep with his brother — but he was getting a sick pleasure from this seduction by proxy. The bedroom was freezing, Nal realized, and he reached over to shut the window — then screamed and leapt a full foot back.

A giant seagull was strutting along Nal’s sill, a bouquet of eelgrass dangling from its beak. Its crown feathers waggled at Nal like tiny fingers. He felt a drip of fear. “What are you doing here?” He had to flick at the webbing of its slate feet before it moved and he could shut the window. The gull cocked its head and bored into Nal with its bright eyes; it was still looking at him as he backed out of the room.

“Hey,” Vanessa greeted him shyly in the kitchen. “So this is McGowen’s place.” She was wearing thin silver bracelets up her arm and had blown out her hair. She had circled her eyes in lime and magenta powder; to Nal it looked as if she’d allowed a bag of candy to melt on her face. He thought she looked much prettier in school.

“Do you guys want chips or anything?” he asked stupidly, looking from Samson to Vanessa. “Soda? I have chips.”

Vanessa kept her eyes on the nubby carpet. “Soda sounds good.”

“He’s just leaving,” Samson said. He squeezed Nal’s shoulder as he spun him toward the door. “Thank you,” he said, leaning in so close that Nal could smell the spearmint and vodka mix on his breath, “thank you so much”—which somehow made everything worse.

“NAL DRIVES THE LANE! Nal brings the ball upcourt with seconds to play!” Nal whispered, dribbling his ball well past midnight. He dribbled up and down the main street that led to Strong Beach, and kept spooking himself with his own image in the dark storefront windows. “Nal has the ball …” He continued down to the public courts. “Jesus! Not you again!” A giant seagull had perched on the backboard and was staring opaquely forward. “Get out of here!” Nal threw the ball until the backboard juddered, but the bird remained. Maybe it’s sick, Nal thought. Maybe it has some kind of neurological damage. He tucked the ball under his arm and walked farther down Strong Beach. The seagull flew over his head and disappeared into a dark thicket of pines, the beginnings of the National Reserve forest that lined Strong Beach. Nal was surprised to find himself jogging after it, following the bird into those shadows.

“Gull?” he called after it, his sneakers sinking into the dark leaves.

He found it settled on a low pine branch. The giant seagull had a sheriff’s build — distended barrel chest, spindly legs splayed into star-shaped feet. Nal had a sudden presentiment: “Are you my conscience?” he asked, reaching out to stroke the vane of one feather. The gull blatted at Nal and began digging around the underside of one wing with its beak like a tiny man sniffing his armpits. Okay, not my conscience, then, Nal decided. But maybe some kind of omen? Something was dangling from its lower beak — another cigarette, Nal thought at first, then realized it was a square of glossy paper. As he watched, the gull lifted off the branch and soared directly into one of the trees. In the moonlight, Nal saw a hollow there about the size of his basketball: gulls kept disappearing into this hole. Dozens of them were flying around the moon-bright leaves — they moved with the organized frenzy of bees or bats. How deep was the hollow? he wondered. Was this normal nocturnal activity for this kind of gull? The birds flew in absolute silence. Their wingtips sailed as softly as paintbrushes across the night sky; every so often single birds descended from this cloud. Each gull flapped into the hollow and didn’t reemerge for whole minutes.

Nal chucked his basketball at the hollow to see if it would disappear, go winking into another dimension, like objects did in that terrible TV movie he secretly loved, Magellan Maps the Black Hole. The basketball bounced back and caught Nal hard against his jaw. He winced and shot a look up and down Strong Beach to make sure that nobody had seen. The hollow was almost a foot above Nal’s head, and when he pushed up to peek inside it he saw nothing: just the pulpy reddish guts of the tree. No seagulls, and no passage through that he could divine. There was a nest in the tree hollow, though, a dark wet cup of vegetation. The bottom of the nest was lined with paper scraps — a few were tickets, Nal saw, not stubs or fragments but whole squares, some legible: Mary Gloster’s train tickets to Florence, a hologram stamp for a Thai Lotus Blossom day cruise, a roll of carnival-red ADMIT ONES. Nal riffled through the top layer. Mary Gloster’s tickets, he noticed, were dated two years in the future. He saw a square edge with the letters WIL beneath a wreath of blackened moss and tugged at it. My ticket, Nal thought wonderingly. WILSON. How did the gulls get this? It was his pass for the rising sophomore class’s summer trip to Whitsunday Island, a glowing ember of volcanic rock that was just visible from the Athertown marina. He was shocked to find it here; his mother hadn’t been able to pay the fee back in April, and Nal’s name had been removed from the list of participants. The trip was tomorrow.

Nal was at the marina by 8:00 a.m. He was sitting on a barrel when his teacher arrived, and he watched as she tore open a sealed envelope and distributed the tickets one by one to each of his classmates. He waited until all the other students had disappeared onto the ferry to approach her.

“Nal Wilson? Oh dear. I wasn’t aware that you were coming …” She gave him a tight smile and shook out the empty manila envelope, as if trying to convince him that his presence here was a slightly embarrassing mistake.

“ ’S okay, I have my ticket here.” Nal waved the orange ticket, which was shot through with tiny perforations from where the gull’s beak had stabbed it. He lined up on the waffled copper of the ferry ramp. The boat captain stamped his ticket redeemed, and Nal felt that he had won a small but significant battle. On the hydrofoil, Nal sat next to Vanessa. “That’s my seat,” grumbled a stout Fijian man in a bolo tie behind him, but Nal shrugged and gestured around the hold. “Looks like there are plenty of seats to go around, sir,” he said, and was surprised when the big man floated on like some bad weather he’d dispelled with native magic. He could feel Vanessa radiating warmth beside him and was afraid to turn.

“Hey, you,” Vanessa said. “Thanks for letting me crash in your bed last night.”

“Don’t mention it. Always fun to be the maid service for my brother.”

Vanessa regarded him quietly for a moment. “I like your hair.”

“Oh,” Nal said miserably, rolling his eyes upward. “This blue isn’t really me—” and then he felt immediately stupid, because just who did he think he was, anyway? Cousin Steve refused to shave it off, saying that to do so would be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath of Beauty Professionals. “Unfortunately you have an extremely lumpy head,” Cousin Steve had informed him, stern as a physician. “You need that blue to hide the contours. It’s like you’ve got golf balls buried up there.” But Vanessa, he saw with a rush of gratitude, was nodding at him.

“I know it’s not you,” she said. “But it’s a good disguise.”

Nal nodded, wondering what she might be referring to. He was thrilled by the idea that Vanessa saw past this camouflage to something hidden in him, so secret that even he didn’t know what she was seeing there.

On the long ride to Whitsunday, they talked about their families. Vanessa was the youngest of five girls, and, from what she was telling Nal, it sounded as if her adolescence had been both accelerated and prolonged. She was still playing with dolls when she watched her eldest sister, Rue Ann, guide her boyfriend to their bedroom. “We have to leave the lights on, or Vanessa will be scared. It’s fine, she’s still tiny. She doesn’t understand.” The boyfriend grinning into her playpen, twaddling his fingers. Vanessa watched with eyes round as moon pies as her sister disrobed, draping her black T-shirt over the lampshade to dim it. But she had also been babied by her four sisters, and her questions about their activities got smothered beneath a blanket of care. Her parents began treating her like the baby of the family again once the other girls were gone. Her father was a Qantas mechanic and her mother worked a series of housekeeping jobs even though she didn’t strictly need to, greeting Vanessa with a nervous “Hello!” at the end of each day.

“Which is funny, because our own house is always a mess now …”

Nal watched the way her mouth twitched; his heart and his stomach were staging some weird circus inside him.

“Yeah, that’s pretty funny.” Nal frowned. “Except that, I mean, it sounds really awful, too …”

He tried to get one arm around Vanessa’s left shoulder but felt too cowardly to lower it all the way; he stared in horror at where his arm had stopped, about an inch above Vanessa’s skin, like a malfunctioning bar in a theme park ride. When he lifted his arm again he noticed a gauzy stripe peeking out of Vanessa’s shirt.

“I’m sorry,” Nal interrupted, “Vanessa? Uh, your shirt is falling down …”

“Yeah.” She tugged at it, unconcerned. “This was Brianne’s, and she was never what you’d call petite. She’s an air hostess now and my dad always jokes that he doesn’t know how she maneuvers the aisles.” Vanessa hooked a clear nail under her neckline. “My dad can be pretty mean. He’s mad at her for leaving.”

Nal couldn’t take his eyes off the white binding. “Is that … is that a bandage?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “It’s my disguise.”

Vanessa said she still held on to some childlike habits because they seemed to calm her parents. “I had to pretend I believed in Santa Claus until I was twelve,” she said. “Did Sam tell you that I was accepted to LMASS, too?”

“Oh, wow. Congratulations. When do you leave?”

“I’m not going. I mentioned that the dorms at Lake Marion were coed and my father didn’t speak to me for days.” Why her development of breasts should terrify her parents Vanessa didn’t understand, but she began wearing bulky, loose shirts and wrapping Ace bandages over her bras all the same. “I got the idea from English class,” she said. “Shakespeare’s Rosalind.” Her voice changed when she talked about this — she let out a hot, embarrassed laugh and then dove into a whisper, as if she’d been trying to make a joke and suddenly switched gears.

“Isn’t that a little weird?” Nal said.

Vanessa shrugged. “Less friction with my parents. The tape doesn’t work as good as it did last year but it’s sort of become this habit?”

Nal couldn’t figure out where he was supposed to look; he was having a hard time staying focused in the midst of all this overt discussion of Vanessa’s breasts.

“So you’re stuck there now?”

“I don’t see how I could leave my folks. I’m their last.”

Vanessa wanted out but said she felt as though the exits had vanished with her sisters. They’d each schemed or blundered their way out of Athertown — early pregnancy, nursing school, marriage, the Service Corps. Now Vanessa rumbled around the house like its last working part. Nal got an image of Mr. and Mrs. Grigalunas sitting in their kitchen with their backs to the whirlwind void opened by their daughters’ absence: reading the paper; sipping orange juice; collecting these old clothes like the shed skins of their former daughters and dressing Vanessa in them. He thought about her gloopy makeup and the urgency with which she’d kissed his brother, her thin legs knifing over the dune. Maybe she doesn’t actually like my brother at all, Nal thought, encouraged by a new theory. Maybe she treats sex like oxidizing air. Aging rapidly wherever she can manage it, like a cut apple left on a counter.

“That’s why it’s easy to be with your brother,” she said. “It’s a relief to … to get out of there, to be with someone older. But it’s not like we’re serious, you know?” She brightened as she said this last part, as if it were a wonderful idea that had just occurred to her.

What do I say now? Nal wondered. Should I ask her to explain what she means? Should I tell her Samson doesn’t love her, but I do? The homunculus typed up frantic speeches, discarded them, tore at his green sweater in anguish, gnashed the typewriter ribbon between his buckteeth. Nal could hear himself babbling — they talked about the insufferable stupidity of this year’s ninth-graders, his harem of geezers at Penny’s, Dr. J’s jump hook, Cousin Steve’s bewildering mullet. More than once, Nal watched her tug her sister’s tentlike shirt up. They spent the rest of the afternoon exploring Whitsunday Island together, cracking jokes as they filed past the flowery enclosure full of crocodiles; the dry pool of Komodo dragons with their wispy beards; and finally, just before the park’s exit, the koala who looked like a raddled veteran of war, gumming leaves at twilight. They talked about how maybe it wasn’t such a terrible thing that they’d both missed out on Lake Marion, and on the way back up the waffled ramp to the hydrofoil Vanessa let her hand slide inside Nal’s sweating palm.

That night Nal had a nightmare about the seagulls. Millions of them flew out of a bloodred sunset and began to resettle the town, snapping telephone wires and sinking small boats beneath their collective weight. Gulls covered the fence posts and rooftops of Athertown, drew a white caul over the marina, muffled every window with the static of their bodies — and each gull had a burgled object twinkling in its split beak. Warping people’s futures into some new and terrible shapes, just by stealing these smallest linchpins from the present.

THE NEXT DAY, Nal went to the Athertown library to research omen birds. He was the only patron in the reading room. Beneath the painting of the full orange moon and the plastic bamboo, he read a book called Avian Auspices by Dr. Carlos Ramirez. Things looked pretty grim:

CROW: an omen of death, disease

RAVEN: an omen of death, disease

ALBATROSS: an omen of death at sea

Screech owls, Old World vultures, even the innocuous-sounding cuckoo, all harbingers of doom. Terrific, Nal thought, and if an enormous seagull followed you around and appeared to be making a blithe feast of your life, pecking at squares of paper and erasing whole futures, what did that mean? Coleridge and Audubon were no help here, either. Seagulls were scavengers, kleptoparasites. And, according to the books he found, they didn’t portend a thing.

Nal began going to the nest every day. He woke at dawn and walked barefoot on the chilly sand down to the hollow. By the second week he’d collected an impressive array of objects: a tuxedo button, a scrap of paper with a phone number (out of service — Nal tried it), a penny with a mint date one year in the future. On Friday, he found what appeared to be the disgorged, shimmering innards of a hundred cassette tapes, disguised at first against the slick weeds. The seagulls had many victims, then — they weren’t just stealing from Nal. He wondered if the gulls had different caches, in caves or distant forests. Whenever he swept his hand over the damp nest he found new stuff:

An eviction notice, neatly halved by the gull’s beak

Half a dozen keys of various sizes — car keys, big skeleton keys and tiny ones for safes and mailboxes, a John Deere tractor key, one jangling janitor’s ring

A cheap fountain pen

A stamp from a country Nal didn’t recognize

An empty vial of pills, the label soaking and illegible

Most disturbingly, on the soggy bottom of the nest, beneath a web of green eider, he found the disconnected wires of a child’s gleaming retainer

Nal lined these objects up and pushed them around on the sand. He felt like the paleontologist of some poor sod’s stolen fate — somewhere a man or a woman’s life continued without these tiny vertebrae, curving like a spine knocked out of alignment. Suddenly the ordinary shine of the plastic and aluminum bits began to really frighten him. He drew the tiny fangs of the tractor key through the sand and tried to imagine the objects’ owners: A shy child without his retainer, with a smile that would now go unchaperoned. A redhead with pale eyelashes succumbing to fever. A farmer on his belly in a field of corn, hunting for this key. What new directions would their lives take? In Nal’s imagination, dark stalks swayed and knit together, obliterating the stranger from view. Somewhere the huge tractor wheels began to groan and squeal backward, trampling his extant rows of corn. A new crop was pushing into the spaces that the tractor had abandoned — husks hissing out of the earth, bristling and green, like the future sprouting new fur.

We have to alert the authorities, he decided. He zipped the future into his backpack and walked down to the police station.

“What do you want me to do with this sack of crap, son?” Sheila, the Athertown policewoman, wanted to know. “The pawnshop moved; it’s down by the esplanade now. Why don’t you take this stuff over there, see if Mr. Tarak will give you some quarters for it. Play you some video games.”

“But it belongs to somebody.” Nal hadn’t found the courage to tell her his theory that the foreign flock of gulls were cosmic scavengers. He tried to imagine saying this out loud: “The seagulls are stealing scraps of our lives to feather this weird nest I found in a tree hollow on Strong Beach. These birds are messing with our futures.” Sheila, who had a red lioness’s mane of curls bursting from an alligator clip and bigger triceps than Nal’s, did not look as if she suffered fools gladly. She was the kind of woman who would put DDT in the nest and call it a day.

“So leave it here then.” She shrugged. “When somebody comes to report the theft of their number two pencil, I’ll let you know.”

On Saturday he found a wedding invitation for Bruce and Nancy, in an envelope the color of lilac icing. There was no return address. On Tuesday he checked the nest and found the wrinkled passport of one Dodi Watts. Did that mean he was dead, or never was? Nal shuddered. Or just that he’d missed his flight?

His guesswork was beginning to feel stupid. Pens and keys and train tickets, so what? Now what? Sheila was right. How was he supposed to make anything out of this sack of crap?

The giant seagull, which Nal now thought of as his not-conscience, appeared to be the colony’s dominant gull. Today it was screaming in wide circles over the sea. Nal sat on a canted rock and watched something tiny fall from its beak into the waves, glinting all the way down. Beneath him the waves had turned a foam-blistered violet, and the sky growled. The whole bowl of the bay seethed around the rocks like a cauldron. Nal shuddered; when he squinted he could see something fine as salt shaking into the sea. Rain, he thought, watching the seagull ride the thermals, maybe it’s only raining …

Later, when the sky above Strong Beach was riddled with stars, Nal got up on shaky legs and entered the woods. The gulls had vanished, and it was hard for him to find the tree with the hollow. He stumbled around with his flashlight for what felt like hours looking for it, growing increasingly frantic until he felt near-hysterical, his heart drumming. Even after he’d found what he thought was the right tree Nal couldn’t be sure, because the nest inside was damp and empty. He sank his hands into the old leaves and at first felt nothing, but digging down he began to find an older stratum of plunder: a leather bookmark, a baby’s rusting spoon. The gulls must have stolen this stuff a while ago, Nal thought, from a future that was now peeling away in ribbons, a future that had already been perverted or lost, a past. At the very bottom of the nest he saw a wink of light. Nal pinched at the wink, pulled it out.

“Oh God,” he groaned. When he saw what he was holding he almost dropped it. “Is this some kind of joke?”

It was nothing, really. It was just a dull knuckle of metal. A screw.

Nal closed his fist around the screw, opened it. Here was something indigestible. It was a stop screw — he knew this from the diagram that had run with the local paper’s story “Allegations of Nursing Home Negligence,” next to a photograph of the two-inch chasm in the Paradise window made lurid by the journalist’s ink. They’d also run a bad photo of his mother. Her face had been washed out by the fluorescent light. She was old, Nal realized. It looked like the “scandal” had aged her. Nal had stared at his mother’s gray face and seen a certain future, something you didn’t need a bird to augur.

He wouldn’t even show her, he decided. What was the point of coming back here? The screw couldn’t shut that window now.

NAL WAS SHOOTING hoops on the public court half a mile from Mr. McGowen’s house when Samson found him. A fine dust from the nearby construction site kept blowing over in clouds whenever the wind picked up. Nal had to kick a crust of gravel off the asphalt so that he could dribble the ball.

“Hey, buddy, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Mom says you two had a fight?”

Nal shoots, whispered the homunculus. He turned away from Samson and planted his feet on the asphalt. Shooter’s roll — the ball teetered on the edge and at the last moment fell into the basket. “It was nothing; it was about college again. What do you need?”

“Just a tiny loan so I can buy Vanessa a ring. Mr. Tarak’s going to let me do it in installments.”

“Mr. Tarak said that?” Nal had always thought of Mr. Tarak as a CASH ONLY!!! sort of merchant. He had a spleeny hatred of everyone under thirty-five and liked telling Nal his new haircut made him look like the Antichrist.

Samson laughed. “Yeah, well, he knows I’m good for it.” Sam was used to the fact that people went out of their way for him. It made strangers happy to see Samson happy and so they’d give him things, let him run up a tab with them, just to buoy that feeling.

“What kind of ring? A wedding ring?”

“Nah, it’s just … I dunno. She’ll like it. Tiny flowers on the inside part, what do you call that …”

“The band.” Nal’s eyes were on the red square on the backboard; he squatted into his thin calves. “Are you in love?”

Samson snorted. “We’re having fun, Nal. We’re having a good time.” He shrugged. “It’s her birthday, help me out.”

“Sorry,” Nal said, shooting again. “I got nothing.”

“You’ve got nothing, huh?” Samson leaned in and made a playful grab for the ball, and Nal slugged him in the stomach.

“Jesus! What’s wrong with you?”

Nal stared at his fist in amazement. He’d had no idea that swing was in the works. Wind pushed the ball downcourt and he flexed his empty hands. When his brother took a step toward him he swung wide and slammed his fist into the left shoulder — pain sprang into his knuckles and Nal had time to cock his fist back again. He thought, I am going to really mess you up here, right before Samson shoved him down onto the gravel. He stared down at Nal with an open mouth, his bare chest contracting. No signs of injury there, Nal saw with something close to disappointment. The basket craned above them. Blood and pebbled pits colored Nal’s palms and raked up the sides of his legs. He could feel, strangest of all, a grin spreading on his face.

“Did I hurt you?” Nal asked. He was still sitting on the blacktop. He noticed that Samson was wearing his socks.

“What’s your problem?” Samson said. He wasn’t looking at Nal. One hand shielded his eyes, the sun pleating his forehead, and he looked like a sailor scouting for land beyond the blue gravel. “You don’t want to help me out, just say so. Fucking learn to behave like a normal person.”

“I can’t help you,” Nal called after him.

Later that afternoon, when Strong Beach was turning a hundred sorbet colors in the sun, Nal walked down the esplanade to Mr. Tarak’s pawnshop. He saw the ring right away — it was in the front display, nested in a cheap navy box between old radios and men’s watches, a quarter-full bottle of Chanel.

“Repent,” said Mr. Tarak without looking up from his newspaper. “Get a man’s haircut.”

“I’d like to buy this ring here,” Nal tapped on the glass.

“On hold.”

“I can make the payment right now, sir. In full.”

Mr. Tarak shoved up off his stool and took it out. It didn’t look like a wedding band; it was a simple wrought-iron thing with a floral design etched on the inside. Nal found he didn’t care about the first woman who had pawned or lost it, or Samson who wanted to buy it. Nal was the owner now. He paid and pocketed the ring.

Before he went to catch the 3:03 bus to Vanessa’s house, Nal returned to the pinewoods. If he was really going through with this, he didn’t want to take any chances that these birds would sabotage his plan. He took his basketball and fitted it in the hollow. The gulls were back, circumnavigating the pine at different velocities, screeching irritably. He watched with some satisfaction as one scraped its wing against the ball. He patted the ring in his pocket. He knew this was just a temporary fix. There was no protecting against the voracity of the gulls. If fate was just a tapestry with a shifting design — some fraying skein that the gulls were tearing right this second — then Nal didn’t see why he couldn’t also find a loose thread, and pull.

VANESSA’S HOUSE WAS part of a new community on the outskirts of Athertown. The bus drove past the long neck of a crane rising out of an exposed gravel pit, the slate glistening with recent rain. A summer shower had rolled in from the east and tripped some of the streetlights prematurely. The gulls had not made it this far inland yet; the only birds here were sparrows and a few doll-like cockatoos along the fences.

Vanessa seemed surprised and happy to see him. “Come in,” she said, her thin face filling the doorway. She looked scrubbed and plain, not the way she did with Samson. “Nobody’s home but me. Is Sam with you?”

“No,” said Nal. For years he’d been planning to say to her, I think we’re meant to be, but now that he was here he didn’t say anything; his heart was going, and he almost had to stop himself from shoving his way inside.

“I brought you this,” he said, pushing the ring at her. “I’ve been saving up for it.”

“Nal!” she said, turning the ring over in her hands. “But this is really beautiful …”

It was easy. What had he worried about? He just stepped in and kissed her, touched her neck. Suddenly he was feeling every temperature at once, the coolness of her skin and the wet warmth of her mouth and even the tepid slide of sweat over his knuckles. She kissed him back, and Nal slid his hand beneath the neckline of her blouse and touched the bandage there. The Grigalunases’ house was dark and still inside, the walls lined with framed pictures of dark-haired girls who looked like funhouse images of Vanessa, her sisters or her former selves. An orange cat darted under the stairwell.

“Nal? Do you want to sit down?” She addressed this to her own face in the foyer mirror, a glass crescent above the door, and when she turned back to Nal her eyes had brightened, charged with some anticipation that almost didn’t seem to include him. Nal kissed her again and started steering her toward the living room. A rope was pulling him forward, a buried cable, and he was able to relax into it now only because he had spent his short lifetime doing up all the knots. Perhaps this is how the future works, Nal thought — nothing fated or inevitable but just these knots like fists that you could tighten or undo.

Nal and Vanessa sat down on the green sofa, a little stiffly. Nal had never so much as grazed a girl’s knee, but somehow he was kissing her neck, he was sliding a hand up her leg, beneath the elastic band of her underwear.

Vanessa struggled to undo Nal’s belt and the tab of his jeans, and now she looked up at him; his zipper was stuck. He was trapped inside his pants. Thanks to his recent weight loss, he was able to wriggle out of them, tugging furiously at the denim. At last he got them off with a grunt of satisfaction and, breathless and red-faced, flung them to the floor. The zipper liner left a nasty scratch down his skin. Nal began to unroll his socks, hunching over and angling his hipbones. It was strange to see the splay of his dark toes on the Grigalunases’ carpet, Vanessa half-naked beyond it.

She could have whinnied with laughter at him; instead, with a kindness that you can’t teach people, she had walked over to the windows while Nal hopped and writhed. She had taken off her shirt and unwound the bandage and was shimmying out of her bra. The glass had gone dark with thunderheads. The smell of rain had crept into the house. She drew the curtains and slid out of the rest of her clothes. The living room was now a blue cave — Nal could see the soft curve of the sofa’s back in the dark. Was he supposed to turn the light on? Which way was more romantic? “Sorry,” he said as they both walked back to the sofa, their eyes flicking all over each other. Vanessa slid a hand over Nal’s torso.

“You and Samson have the same boxer shorts,” she said.

“Our mother buys them for us.”

Maybe this isn’t going to happen, Nal thought.

But then he saw a glint of silver and felt recommitted. Vanessa had slipped the pawnshop ring on — it was huge on her. She caught him looking and held her hand up, letting the ring slide over her knuckle, and they both let out jumpy laughs. Nal could feel sweat collecting on the back of his neck. They tried kissing again for a while. Vanessa’s dark hair slid through his hands like palmfuls of oil as he fumbled his way inside her, started to move. He wanted to ask: Is this right? Is this okay? It wasn’t at all what he’d imagined. Nal, moving on top of Vanessa, was still Nal, still cloaked with consciousness and inescapably himself. He didn’t feel invincible — he felt clumsy, guilty. Vanessa was trying to help him find his rhythm, her hands just above his bony hips.

“Hey,” Vanessa said at one point, turning her face to the side. “The cat’s watching.”

The orange tabby was licking its paws on the first stair, beneath the clock. The cat had somehow gotten hold of the stop screw — it must have fallen out of his pocket — and was batting it around.

The feeling of arrival Nal was after kept receding like a charcoal line on bright water. This was not the time or the place but he kept picturing the gulls, screaming and wheeling in a vortex just beyond him, and he groaned and sped up his motions. “Don’t stop,” Vanessa said, and there was such a catch to her voice that Nal said, “I won’t, I won’t,” with real seriousness, like a parent reassuring a child. Although very soon, Nal could feel, he would have to.