He woke thinking he heard birds nesting in the motel room. In his gray briefs he pushed aside the curtains, roughly starched on a warped plastic track, but there was nothing behind them—the same parking lot, a big rig painted with bubbles and the slogan IT’S THE REAL THING, a gas station with a scrolling marquee whose last numeral had stuck between six and seven. Behind flimsy pocket doors, the closet’s hangers stayed secured to the rod by loops, the shelves above them still empty. A radio, he thought, a television in the next room, but when he stepped into the hall the sound faded.
It was coming from the bathroom. He placed the pads of his fingers on the door, which sat a full inch above the wan tile, and slipped in. The chirps were coming from inside the walls, he thought, perhaps behind the shower where the mold had been painted over. In the fan built in to the ceiling, through the radial swirls of plastic that would animate at the flip of a switch, he could see little bits of dried grass and plastic, hear the squabbles of adjustment. He tried to explain it to himself, how they were laid there, how the mother had left them. A hole in the roofing she had flown through, the gap soon patched so she couldn’t return.
There was only one switch, light and fan. He looked down at his shoes, the duct tape wrapped around the balls of his feet to cover a hole. Sitting on the rim of the bathtub, he began to pull it free, the adhesive trailing behind the silver in protest, the shape of the ribbon becoming warped. When he was done he tore off smaller pieces with his teeth, tasting the bits of stiff dirt and concrete that had made their way in, and then he began to cover the plastic rectangle that held the little lever, isolating its position at thirty degrees, hardening it there, pressing his fingers along the edges of the tape with his full weight. How long would it buy them, keep the blades off? Three days, a week, depending on the guests to come, how indifferent they were to their surroundings, how clearly they wanted to see their nipples and beer guts and crow’s-feet.
He stood with his hands on the pink vinyl counter, appraising himself in the mirror in the low six P.M. light. A child still, he thought, removing his shirt and watching the demure curve of his shoulders as though they might fill with musculature as he evaluated them, reflect what he had done with Brianna, what she had forced him to do. That she had fucked him had not allowed Wright to enter some new version of himself, only made it clear how far he was from the one he needed.
His hand on her jaw, he sat on his mother’s bed. All he wanted was to tell her about the predicament of the birds, see her face turn at the injustice of it. She smiled in a way that felt alien, as though the teeth and lips had received inadequate instruction, and took his fingers. That she had removed her eyelashes was a fact he declined to acknowledge further, knowing there would be some symbol she saw in it and would ask him to consider.
When she’d returned that evening he had refused to look her way, locked his jaw and raised a straight arm, the remote a seamless addition at the tip of his fingers, to the television. The Price Is Right baffled him completely, the prerequisite knowledge of the things you had already bought to guess at the value of the things you might win. Money, in America, was a party you entered and could not leave. The longer you stayed, the more you imagined the happiness to be found on the other side of the room, if you could just work your away across.
“There’s a protest I want to attend,” she said now, speaking as slowly as she had when disciplining him as a toddler. “It has nothing to do with Shelter, though they reached me through them. You’ll be glad to know that. The invitation came in some days ago but I wanted to sit with it awhile.”
He waited, his bowels turning over, for the thing she was concealing to show itself in some euphemism, for the faltering in her careful phrasing. She had called Shelter a collective focused on change, Randy a boy whose life was taken from him, his missing finger dexterity sacrificed to condemn one. There was always, with her, some gauzy lingual veil fallen over the truth, some other conversation taking place on the inside of the words he could actually hear.
“It’s a demonstration to take place at the launch of the last Apollo mission, organized by some brilliant college students who see the country’s space program as a distraction from the systemic abuse and disenfranchisement of so many. They want to form that association in the public’s mind.”
“How,” he said. He wanted the truth while she had no acolytes to defend it, no distractions to offer him, no other room to enter.
She was sitting up now, cross-legged, her hands spread across her knees. She spoke with the fidgety air of an expert, pushing some hair behind her ear, rotating a raised palm for emphasis, like someone explaining a procedure that had become a simple matter of muscle memory. Just a talk, she was saying, just a supplement to the images the group would provide, of the people forgotten by the American spectacle.
He was silent now, as distant from her as he could be, in the far corner of the room with his forehead resting in the wedge. Only faintly, under the sound of all the blood in his body pounding in his ears, could he hear the room.
“I’m not coming,” he said.
“America has to see what it has done to its future,” she said, weakly, for the first time he could remember not convinced by her own rhetoric.
“Who are you talking to? Who do you think is recording this right now, its future? We’re two people in a very bad motel in Georgia, and I’m not its future. I’m just your son. That I’d gladly give up.”
“I know that. I understand that, how I’ve failed you. I want to free you of this. I want you to become who you are. I’ve been in touch with your grandparents, and they say they’ll take you. They live on a hill in California. I was pregnant with you there. We grew tomatoes together, you and I, we fed chickens. You’ll recognize it.”
“Recognize it. I’m sure that feels nice to believe.”
“Come with me.”
“No.”
“You would do it knowing you had a new life ahead of you. A gas stove, a Labrador, oil landscapes on the walls. Clean laundry every Sunday. Starched. They are nothing like me, my parents. They would always be the same. Will you come?”
“What happened to how you felt about me? What happened to ‘you’ll be teaching me, my love’?”
“Do you want to live like this any longer? Coin-operated beds, a hospital if either of us needed it out of the question?”
He knew she was talking to herself now and he let her, his face only changing with the colors of the television he’d got up and turned on again. Verdigris. Cyan. Ancient, modern red.
“The moment it’s over you’ll be free to go. If I sent you now you’d be recognized on your way, if I sent you now it might keep me from this. Will you come?”
ON THE BUS TO FLORIDA he told her about the birds trapped in the fan’s chamber, the bits of duct tape he had repurposed. Her eyes went glassy and her palms opened, and she looked as she had by the waterfalls, between then and now so many days where nothing was said, a winter that had left them both with a bronchitic cough.
“That’s so kind,” she said. “Your compassion is an indelible part of you.”
“They’ll die anyway. They’ll starve.”
Late the night before, after she begged him, squatting, I need you to come, stroking his head, this way America might learn what it needs to, leaning her spine against his when he turned again to the corner, the very last time, looping a forefinger around his big toe, I can’t make it there without you, rubbing the lobe of his ear, he had assented.
Ahead of and behind them were people who looked like they had been passengers all their lives, waiting for the time they were told they could eat or sleep. A half hour into the ride the bus swerved to miss the gnarled metal debris of an accident. Fay gasped and put her hands to the ceiling, but Wright only looked down the aisle of thinning purple carpet, his sight on the windshield broad and high.