macrocosm - chapter 2

Automatic prescribed answers delineate authority-figures from decision-makers among Almspoint East's prestigious counseling staff. A preemption of seven days orientation training rigorously tests staff via multiple-choice exams, mock camper-counselor trial scenarios, first-aid/CPR demonstrations and finally a ten question quiz on Aristolean philosophy, focusing mainly on the Greek conception of polis and the peripatetic education process. Camp director Rodney Caules is aware that even among “The Best Staff He's Ever Had” there are some counselors who take the orientation material to heart, openly expounding on it within class and cabin, while others memorize the material rote for the exams and trials, hoping it will never apply in concrete situation. Distinguishing these two types is a primary function of all the testing, the results of which are used to determine cabin placement. Outside of drowning or cranial trauma, worst-case scenarios occur inevitably when your cabin's campers question the mission statement behind Almspoint's conflict resolution ethos.
Mathias hates these conversations and he furiously chews three sticks of Big Red in order to keep the bile down. If not from Ross Morser than it comes from Mark Xalfas or Jonah Juspeczyk. Juspeczyk is somewhat more sincere than the rest. They know that Mathias is a former camper, a product of this same program, and can't fathom why he would come back here as an adult. But this is only Friday, four days into the end of Session One ,Week One. Mathias hopes they'll eventually leave this place thinking about baseball games or climbing walls, not philanthropic advertising tactics. Mathias, as a first hand graduate of the resolution program, has his own censored explanation for Almspoint's ideology: rich parents are liberal parents and only liberal parents force their children into an apocryphal, heterodox experiment dreamed up to nurture utopia. He's much more comfortable distributing the authorized cannon.

“Because it involves both money and time,” Mathias is telling Morser. “Because even though people will imitate someone like themselves, they are more likely to imitate someone powerful. So Almspoint -- and your folks, who employ Rodney -- piggybacks it's ethics with your family's wealth, their prestige in wine and cheese type social circles, and the copious amounts of free time that comes with their luxury.”

“But who is Rodney or my Dad to say what is good?” Ross asks.

Ross is trying to make his bed but has only, after five minutes, managed to tuck the eiderdown comforter and not his jersey sheets into the wooden bunk that he sleeps on. Most of the new cabins at Almspoint don't have these wooden sleeping structures, Rodney opted for coiled metal frames in 1997, but Tristan De Cuhna was one of the first cabins here, back before it was Almspoint and was called Camp Coldbrook. It's fairly obvious that this isn't something expected of Ross at the homestead. Mathias guesses there is a Phillippino ahma or some other house servant who attends to such perfunctory matters. Just the presence of an eiderdown comforter would give you such an impression. Ross is on his knees, head at level with the mattress, sulking his way through the whole process. He has obviously found, in past years at Almspoint, that by asking questions of relative import to the camp's philosophy, he can distract a counselor long enough to avoid the principle cabin duties that both the campers and counselors are responsible for each morning after breakfast and before Morning Cove.

“What makes my Dad, despite his position and money, have any more or less of a say about how people should behave?”

“That's the whole point. Almspoint realizes that most people will react with just that question, by assuming your folks are elitists. You're about cooking with gas here. By combining kids from different locations, ethnicities, income brackets, et al, the advertised idea is that you nine dudes (Mathias chucks 'dudes' into every one of these resolution lectures) will learn to cooperate and accept one another at an early age. That this is a bona fide result of tribal community.”

Phrases like “tribal community” or “temporary autonomous zone” are brutally bandied about during orientation. Counselors are forced to break off into little groups of five and compose presentations on potential scenarios just like this one. Improvisation encouraged. Then one-by-one all one-hundred-and-twenty-three of them are grilled by Rick Smart or Venetian Swain in dramatized cases where Smart or Swain will pretend to be a camper coming to you for advice. This is with the live audience of your peers acting as an additional pressure cooking variable. And also, Rodney storms up and down the rows of shell-shocked counselors, hands clasped behind his back, his Irish Setter Dagny right at his heels. He'll stop and shout a barrage of incendiary comments. “I'm not fucking Bill Clinton up here!” and “Do you even know what natality means?!?!” were two during Mathias' own shattering indictment. So it not only serves as a mechanism to hammer theses explanations and rhetoric into the counselors heads, it also serves as a Pavlovian response to one warning: Do not disseminate this information wrongly or you will be severely emotionally battered by the administration. Mathias wouldn't be surprised if Mark Mercier actually had the gall to use the phrase emotional beating in the stipulations on the contracts. And though the camper population may be the model of diversity, the counselors really have to kick and scrape to vie for their positions. Almspoint at an average of $2,500.00 U.S. Dollars a summer, pays more than any other camp position in New England. Second years have been known to go on to be Congressional Aides or Goldman & Sachs brokers before even graduating from the university environment.

Mathias gets up and pats Ross' eiderdown twice. “Don't forget to turn the bed down. That always scores Satisfactory. A good trick.”

Jim Dunajski -- Mathias' co-counselor -- is stomach down on Adam Margolis' bed playing Margolis' Gameboy Advance, the little digital Mario toots and clarions tinkling in that wing of the cabin. Margolis is off with Eric Xalfas, sweeping the main partition of the cabin. Margolis was holding the dust pan while Xalfas swept but now Xalfas is improvising the broom as a bo staff and Margolis is defending himself with the dustpan, dumping mud trappings, grass and dust bunnies on his flannel pajamas with every counter. Somehow, despite being covered in disgusting detritus, Margolis still manages to look like a child model for a JC Penny or Filene's catalog.
Mathias has a visceral dislike for Margolis. He tries not to be in that wing of the cabin (Dunajski, Xalfas, Margolis, Morser) for any sustainable periods of time. The kid is always nice. He tries to include all the kids in roof ball, even Jonah Juspeczyk. During orientation briefings Blake Hackshaw from Kerguelen pointed out that Margolis was in his cabin last year and there was question of lights out bullying activity orchestrated by Margolis but eventually displaced onto Xalfas. Margolis' file had handwritten instructions from his mother, Sofia Margolis, that the counselors of Tristan De Cuhna should be on particular watch for any dysfunction related activity to her recent divorce. She spelled dysfunction with a Y. Margolis is the Moriarty that Mathias Ennes believes will be crucial to exposing if things get out of control again with Xalfas.

Rob Eaton breaks up the broom/dust pan fracas and is holding Xalfas at bay with his right hand over the kid's forehead. Rob's another co-counselor in the Tristan Da Cuhna cabin. He's a Floridian white hat, a political science major who likes to build home made rockets with the kids. Every item of his clothing is produced by either Abercrombie & Fitch, L.L. Bean or American Eagle. His girlfriend works in the front office and either dresses him or they shop together frequently. He is a veritable Adonis. Mathias has heard the female swim staff bandy about words on the various substances they have planned for Rob to slurp off of their “princesses”. Eaton is oblivious to his female salivatory gland inducing effects. He likes rockets.

Mathias goes into the cabin bathroom and looks at the chore wheel. He's basically been ready to hit the dock for the last twenty minutes and is killing the time by harping on his campers about the whole turning down the bed scheme he's cooked up to score Tristan Da Cuhna five Satisfactorys in-a-row upon inspection. A cabin with five-in-a-row gets ice cream at lunch. This seems a paltry reward to Mathias. Even in a Thai sweat shop, these kids could produce enough material-to-manpower per hour that could afford one cone each of the soft serve junk from the cafeteria. But he wants it anyway.

Counselor Ben McAvoy and campers Sol Schuster, Josh Posner and Darren Bachrach are using the solitary, scum filled sink to brush their teeth, shave and comb hair. All nine of the boys in Tristan De Cuhna are obsessed with this sort of retro hairstyle where they part their hair and leave a little lick of it springing up in the back. Ross Morser is ace at this styling, on both himself and others, leading to both his constant attentions re: everyone else's hair and accusations that he is more gay than the rest of them. Homosexuality is still a taboo brand for campers and some counselors (Dunajski referred to Juspeczyk as “faggy” and Rodney viz Mathias and Eaton just about hit the proverbial roof), it is curiously not as black-and-white as it used to be when Mathias was a Quark on campus. The boys of Tristan De Cuhna use a percentage system with a sliding scale to assess gayness. Mathias wakes up every morning to Darren Bachrach's estimation of his own sexuality. This morning he was at a righteous 38% approval rating. Apparently, past 50% means you've actually inserted yourself into another boy, where as between 26% and 42% means you've thought about it. 43% to 49% is a surefire bet that you've rubbed one out thinking about it, but the kids don't know what that means, just that Dunajski said it on the first morning they were all together in here. Now 'Rub One Out' just gets bandied around the cabin for at least fifteen minutes after lights out.

Mathias watches the boys surround McAvoy like satellites, ponders shaving his own three-day growth and nixes it. Since he arrived here three weeks ago, Mathias has gone through four and five day phases of shaving and not shaving. He doesn't grow facial hair very easily. It's like his body has testosterone only from the navel down. His legs are perpetually gnarly with pubic commensurate hair; this is a direct result of shaving them for a swimming competition in high school. But he just gets this weird moss like stuff on his face and chest above the abdomen. He likes the idea of a beard and hanging around the docks with it, like a blue collar Gloucester scull worker. It's sort of contradictory to the whole smooth-as-a-baby-seal grooming that's popular in competitive collegiate swimming circles. There are no races to be won here. He only swims when he absolutely can't explain himself to his classes verbally. He just can't get past that five day hurtle with the beard. Around then his face itches like mad and he becomes just about paralyzed when a pimple or two starts forming under some of the scruff, and he knows that if he doesn't turn back now, and then decides to later, even like two or three days later, then when he shaves it off he'll have more volcanic blemish activity than any of the thirteen to sixteen year old Quasars on site.

Mathias goes back into the main partition, forgetting momentarily about the chore wheel, and back into the left wing of the cabin, where his bed and cubby are already in military order. Mathias' only decoration above his bed is a copper plated planespheric astrolabe his grandmother bought him from the Peabody Essex Museum gift shop in Salem. He grabs his Nike goggles off the cubby hanger hook and wraps them over his head and around his neck, letting them just hang there. He's taken to wearing them like this not just around the swim dock. They can be found on his neck at lunch and also at rest hour. He was wearing them last night, when he was making out with Rachel Hoffman behind Mark and Minnie Mercier's cabin.

He also keeps his cardinal red lifeguard whistle strapped to his wrist with a little hemp bracelet that Kat Czerniak made for him in Arts N' Crafts. Plus, she made him a shoelace necklace, strung through a single two inch red button, upon which she painted a white cross. He wore this without exception until Nathaniel Kellar, the waterfront director, pointed out it was highly unnecessary and maybe leaning Mathias a little to the right of fifty on Kellar's very own sliding scale.

Rob comes into Mathias' wing. The kids are all still in the bathroom with McAvoy. Rob picks up a deck of Uno cards up off of Josh Posner's cubby and shuffles them twice, real quick, in his palms.

“P.T. is at it again,” he says, not quite whispering to Mathias.

“P.T. is microns away from having some very personal face time with the Rod.”

“P.T. is playing Mario sequel while I'm sweeping mud.”

“P.T. is still relatively unaware that he's a P.T.?”

“P.T. is a chronic complainer of other people's shirked duties.”

“So he can't possibly be aware of his P.T. status.”

“Not unless P.T. has progressed a rung up the evolutionary ladder.”

“Or P.T. is taking resolution deflection tactics to heart, into his own strategy.”

“Again, the ladder. And P.T.”

“Yes. So we let P.T. inch his way to the Rodster. Right?”

“The Rod isn't as hands-on regarding P.T. activity as I'd like.

“And Mikaljon? Why don't we nudge him about P.T?

“The Integer campus leader is also not as hands-on. Per P.T.”

“Your suggestion?”

“A little affable prompting from P.T.'s peers.”

“Meaning us.”

“Bingo.”

“We should consult the Scotsman.”

“Consulted and deliberated. Three peers in a wing would be a total red herring.”

“Even to one so low on the ladder?”

“And the Quarks in our care don't forget. Maybe higher on ladder than P.T.”

“I agree.”

“McAvoy agrees. Two on triangulation. One will stand on principle.”

“Another hoodwink.”

“Bingo.”

“Myself on principle?”

“Yes. Another affirmative.”

“This is running a trend.”

“You are the whip cracker.”

Mathias slides on his flip-flops and saunters into the main partition again. Rob is shuffling the cards, pretending to arrange Joshua Posner's cubby for a Satisfactory. They need a minute or two distraction to put this play into ignition. Mathias assesses the cabin activity.

Brian Margolis and Eric Xalfas are now arranging Xalfas' various shoes under his bed. Xalfas has three pairs of sneakers, two pairs of sandals and one pair of rain boots. Jonah Juspeczyk has four of sneakers, two of sandals, the rain boots and also one pair of white snake skin cowboy boots. Xalfas is from Worcester, Massachusetts. His mother makes $26,000 U.S. Dollars a year, said Xalfas' file during orientation. Juspeczyk's father is the former chair of the NYSE and Rob believes under nom-de-plume was a senior economics advisor to the Clinton administration. Juspeczyk has all these white pencils with White House printing on them. His father's salary is incalculable. But Jonah mentioned flying in the family jet to London and purchasing camp attire with his Mom from Herod's. Xalfas thinks the United Kingdom is a place where dragons and knights with armor exist. He freaked when he heard McAvoy's accent for the first time.

In the main partition, Dennis Levine is reading last night's cabin Mad Lib out loud. No one is particularly listening. The counselors had to delete the word “scrotum” under Rob's insistence and they used the made up word “squirnum” instead. Levine is in hysterics over squirnum. He says it over and over in different inflections.

Little Sid Rosen is sitting on top of his carefully made bed and painfully looking at framed pictures of the Bijon Friese his parents not so wisely bought him a week before sending him to camp. Sid's bed and cubby and shoes are all immaculate. Mathias never even bothers to ask him if he's done his chore. He always turns the bed down without prompting. Sid's a Boston boy from Brookline and when his crying over the dog gets so gushing that Mathias has to take him outside and talk him down, Mathias will tell him about all of the kung-fu movies he's seen in the Allston Cinema right on Harvard Avenue, down the street from Sid's synagogue. This is a major no-no in Rodney's eyes. You're never supposed to talk about home, yours or theirs, with a hysterical camper. It'll make it worse and they'll start writing a plethora of letters to their folks, telling them how much they want to go home, and Rodney will get personal calls from the parents, which eats up his day time; parents insistent on speaking with their hysterical and histrionic child who has made accusations of abandonment in those letters. Campers are not allowed to speak via payphone with their parents past the third day of a session, even on birthdays, because it interferes with the whole community vibe and melodrama. Rodney will then have to talk the parents down from their own hysteria and histrionics, a communications job he has relegated for the more emotionally susceptible people below him, because even though this is Community Not Authority there is still a well established chain-of-command, not unlike the Stalinist regime of communist Russia. This is what Rob means by Rodney not being hands-on enough. So Mathias is supposed to use deflection as much as possible in these Sid Rosen fits of crying, but doesn't, because he has to hold on to some remnant of his own sense of identity there at Camp Almspoint East, Greenwich, Massachusetts. Or else he himself might break down into fits of hysteria and histrionics, because with all this rhetoric and organization and triangulation and hoodwinking -- all to an altruistic end – Mathias Ennes feels like he's losing self-confidence, confidence that he'd previously assigned to being from an urban area. Like he doesn't know who he is anymore. And if he doesn't know who he is, how can he convince Rachel Hoffman or Kat Czerniak who he is? Or maybe even Elizabeth Dover if he plays his cards right?

Mathias is about to use Sid Rosen as his two minute cover before Standing On Principle with P.T. But he notices Jonah Juspeczyk is also in the partition, just sitting there, motionless on his unmade bed, one single tear slipping down his cheek. Juspeczyk's line of sight is on Sid Rosen. Everything surrounding his bed area is in disarray. One of his sneakers is actually across the room, next to McAvoy's tennis rackets. There's a whole cluster of street hockey safety pads in the bed with him. Jonah's parents mail him Gameboy Advance cartridges every week and there's five of them on the floor next to his cubby, all different colors. Tristan Da Cuhna has an old unused fireplace in the center of the south wall and Mathias can see that one of the cartridges is actually in the fireplace.

Jonah's parents also shipped him this decorative glass globe called a Mega Megaplanet, although Jonah calls it The Metacoid for some reason. He keeps it on an aluminum stand between the cubby and his bed. Mega Megaplanets are made by this local Massachusetts glass artist using a milleflori technique that embeds delicate slivers of colored glass rods and bits of metallic leaf into molten glass. The globe looks like a giant marble, with swirls of azure blues and aubergines forming oceans and continents. It's probably worth seven hundred dollars. The glass rods sometimes overlap in parabolas that look like swelling geometric weather movements arcing across the surface sheen. And there are these colorful three dimensional floral objects that sprout just under the glass ozone. Apparently the artist who makes these things gets off on placing miniature two-inch versions of Mega Megaplanets (so just Megaplanets) all over the globe. He claims to have them secreted them in New Zealand, France, Norway's fjords and Grecian ruins, not to mention countless American and British cities. The Juspeczyks were given this one, The Metacoid, when they agreed to leave it's smaller cousin in the Arizona desert. They go on all sorts of exotic travel adventures while Jonah is sequestered away in Greenwich. It's a fascinating object to stare into, The Metacoid. Mathias has gotten lost before in a particular patch of fused purple milleflori, that gets so dense it looks like a black malignancy in it's nucleus. But Jonah won't let any of the other campers get within three feet of it, and he keeps it under a fleece blanket whenever he's off at a meal or activity.

Mathias sits down on the bed, feeling a knee pad under the comforter and faces away from Jonah. Jonah hates people looking at him when he's upset and got almost violently berserk when McAvoy tried to be sensitive with him on Wednesday, when he was doing this same statuesque crying. Jonah kept thrashing around and McAvoy would try to hold him but Jonah would push him away and hold his hands out like he was a traffic guard. McAvoy won't go near him now and was thrown into a slough of self-doubt about the whole counseling position after that incident. McAvoy hangs with Schuster and Posner almost exclusively now. They try to leave out Darren Bachrach, because he's obnoxious and the only reason anyone can stand him is because of his acerbic and nasty wit when it comes to mocking the less popular kids like Levine, Rosen and Juspeczyk. Jonah Juspeczyk reminds Mathias of the seasonal street performers in Harvard Square who pose as angels on wooden crates, standing perfectly still for hours and hours, under the hot summer sun, with white face paint and spirit gum and blonde wigs on top of the flowing white robes and nine foot wingspans.

“Jonah,” Mathias says, drawling it out to sentence length.

“I'm fine. Really. I won't cry.”

“Totally fine if you do.”

“It's just that when Sid looks at his dog and starts crying and I see him do that, then I can't help myself and I also start crying. It's sad.”

“Understandable.”

“Can I move my bed?” Jonah asks, “Can I be near Ross? Because if I can't see him, Sid I mean, then I won't cry. I promise.”

Mathias and Jonah both know they can't do that. Then Jonah would be in the same wing as Xalfas and Margolis, who would surely turn Ross Morser, the only camper that acknowledges Juspeczyk's presence in a positive way, against Jonah and shatter his emotional frame of my mind. And P.T. would do nothing to restrain them. At night he sleeps like he's dead. He'd never even hear Xalfas and Margolis' scheming or even any actual physical altercations they set upon Jonah. Jonah's file requested that he be placed near Ross Morser and they're technically close, just adjacent through the wing door, but the four counselors could find no way to accommodate every single camper's request of who they wanted to sleep near, the files being so Byzantine and convoluted that it would take a Mensa quantitative reasoning expert to unravel and successfully execute their wishes. Ross isn't even that nice to Jonah, he's just not brutally mean to him.

“I'll have to talk to Rob and Ben,” Mathias replies. He's lying and he knows Jonah knows it. “And Jim. Of course.”

“Ohhh-Kaayy...” Jonah says in a cartoonish falsetto spread.

“Hey.” Mathias nudges Jonah's foot under the street hockey chest plate.

“What?”

“What's the capital of Djibouti?”

“Djibouti. The other place so nice they named it twice.”

“Damn. The capital of Tuvalu?”

“Isn't that your girlfriend's cabin?”

“She's not my girlfriend.”

“Funafuti.”

“Poland?”

“Warsaw.”

“Like the pact. Correct. How about Federated Micronesia?”

“Palikir.”

“Trinidad?”

“Port-Of-Spain.”

“Here's one. I'll throw this at you. Equatorial Guinea.”

“Pfffft... Mulaba.”

“Not Conakry?”

“Mulaba.”

“How about Singapore?”

“Not-applicable. Singapore doesn't have a capital. It's a city, state and a country. On an island.”

“You're scary...”

“You looked those up on the office computer last night. Stacy let you in when Rob asked her to.”

“Huh.”

Mathias gets up from the bed and picks up the Gameboy cartridge from the fireplace. He nudges Jonah's closest sneaker with his own foot.

“Jonah, you have to get this stuff cleaned up before Cove.”

“Hey Mathias!” shouts Dennis Levine.

“What's up?”

“Squirnum!” yells Levine.

Mathias' head goes dizzy from sitting down and standing up quickly. He leans his head back on his expansive shoulders and looks at the row of beams across the roof frame of the Tristan Da Cuhna main partition. All of the session plaques of previous Tristan Da Cuhna campers and counselors are arranged on these, ten to a beam. The plaques are wooden shield carvings, shaped just like the outline of the armorial bearing on their staff shirts, with painted decoration to commemorate the three and a half weeks groups of thirteen people spent together here. One of them has a Big Bertha payload rocketry model glued to the front, with all of the campers names spewing out of the painted orange and yellow blast of the thing. TRISTAN DA CUHNA BLASTS OFF! 1999. says it's top emblem. There's another, obviously pre September Eleventh plaque, with a nerf basketball cut into two halves, spray painted black with pipe cleaners stuffed in them to resemble two cartoon bombs. The bombs are exploding with sprinkles and you can see actual burn marks on the plaque where the cabin had inserted firework sparklers into the nerf balls for their initial presentation of the plaque, so that it looked like a wick was burning down and the bombs were going to really detonate. The counselors from that year clearly left the plaque duties up to their proteges, because the written names are wavering and blurry, running out of appropriate space in some places and squeezed in next to the nerf balls. Someone tried to amend this by going over the names with a crimson paint pen, but it only made the lettering even more distorted, so that it looks like one of those hazy lettered T-shirts that pot smokers wear.

When he finally starts moving toward P.T. again, Mathias' head feels empty and groggy. He hates these confrontations. P.T. is still playing Mario, kicking his legs back and forth behind him so that his moose head shaped slippers are dangling from each foot. Jim Dunajski, Part-Timer, is another water skiing counselor -- who Mathias had been told by Nathanial Kellar will only be driving the boats this summer and not actually instructing children on skis, thank goodness -- a blocky, hairy armed, troglodytic man with virtually no chin. His neck and his face just slide into each other from a concave slope. Dunajski has an antediluvian gait and swagger to him that was Mathias' first sign of something-not-quite-right with the guy. He just had Rob shave his head of the curly mop he came to camp with and now has a military clipped style that makes him look menacing, on top of his usual primitive and degenerate mien. He hates clothing, skinny dips at almost every day off trip, regardless of women joining him. Even on campus, he never wears a shirt unless he has to, which is basically only at meals, since he works on the waterfront. Right now he has just his fleur-de-lis boxers on, aside from the aforementioned moose slippers. P.T. is also afflicted with P.O.M.S., as Mathias' father calls it: Perpetual Open Mouth Syndrome. Dunajski is one of those people who cannot close his mouth when he is performing any task involving gross motor control. The troika of Mathias, Eaton and McAvoy have agreed in private that it must have just been dumb luck that Dunajski was teamed with the three counselor cabin of Bioko for mealtimes, instead of with the Tristan Da Cuhna kids, sparing them daily from watching his gaping maw, struggling to get food from plate to fork to face with that contorted, monomaniacal, concentration on his face. They doubt that Rodney or Tim Mikaljon had anything to do with that arrangement, although both are aware of Dunajski's lack of enthusiasm when it comes to the actual counselling aspect of this job. He keeps a jar of lollipops, candy glo-worms and “real” smarties as he calls them (the chocolate ones produced in Europe and Canada) that he throws at the campers whenever they are as disconcerted as Juspeczyk and Rosen are this morning. He never asks the campers to clean up or write letters home or calm down until ten minutes to ten o'clock every night, when the lights are supposed to go out and the counselors get to leave campus. Beers at Elliot's is usually what Dunajski does then. In those ten minutes prior Dunajski gets loud and aggressive, his Canadian accent flaring at the kids, because they have to be in bed and quiet and satisfied before Mikaljon will allow any of the counselors to leave the campus. And Dunajski is one of several Canadians who work here, proud and in Mathias' opinion, obnoxious and arrogant. The Canadian contingent is always criticizing the American staffers, particularly for the war in Afghanistan, but most annoyingly for the way they speak English and mispronounce it's words or abuse it's grammar. This elitist separation drives Mathias batty. Dunajski has a Canadian flag hung behind his bed frame. Ben McAvoy thinks he is also a chronic liar because he repeats himself a lot, sometimes even in the same conversation.

Mathias strolls back into the right wing, Ross Morser is still struggling with that damn eiderdown, Eric Xalfas and Adam Margolis are fiddling with Xalfas' shoes. Mathias passes them and stands over Margolis' bed, where P.T. is conquering the King Koopa. He jumps up and grabs the beam just above the bed and starts doing pull ups to the beam while he addresses P.T. This way he doesn't have to look at P.T. And won't fidget, just standing there.

“Jim, were you here last year?” he says, chin to the top of the beam.

“Yep.” Dunajski is engrossed in the video game and his mouth hangs open like a bay door. Mathias wonders if mosquitoes or flies ever get caught in there.

“I wonder if you remember someone. A dude from then. Terrance Isaacs?”

There is a pause where Mathias does two more pull ups, hanging all the way down limply, waiting for a response, then pulls himself back up again.

“Jim?”

“Yeah?” P.T. Is furiously thumbing the Gameboy, the muscles in his left upper arm are twitching and his whole torso shifts to the right when he presses the buttons too hard.

“Terrance Isaacs?”

“Don't know him.”

Dunajski twitches and thrashes, flipping and then sitting up, holding the Gameboy mere inches from his face. There is a lot of beeping coming from the device. And then a tootling whomp-whomp jingle, signifying that Dunajski's meta-self, Super Mario, has prematurely met his end.

“Son of a bitch!” Dunajski yells and throws the Gameboy down. It bounces off of Margolis' bed and against the interior wood wall of the cabin.

“Hey! That's my Gameboy!” shouts Margolis from Xalfas' bed.

Dunajski doesn't say anything, just staring in disbelief at the blue and black game device, laying there now at his feet.

“You were using Adam's?” asks Mathias, still holding the pull-up.

“He said I could use it,” says Dunajski. He slides back on Margolis' bed and puts his hands behind his head. “How's that Katie Johnson? Why don't you ask her about this guy?”

“What?”

“You know, the girl from last day off.”

Mathias can't believe P.T. remembers that many days ago. “That was Kat Czerniak. She wasn't here last year.”

“Was?”

“Didn't work out.” Mathias releases his joints and hangs taut from the beam again.

“Was? Was. Was.” Dunajski pulls his hands out from behind his head and adjusts the elastic on his boxers.

“Yes. Was.”

“That's right. It's Rachel Hoffman now.”

Mathias swings from the beam, going over the bed slightly in a way that, if he were to let go, would send him toppling onto Dunajski.

“Well if you knew that, why did you ask about Czerniak?” he asks, “Or Johnson rather?”

“Rach Hoffman has some serious torps.”

“Excuse me?”

“Torps. Torpedoes. Bombs. Boobs.”

Xalfas and Margolis giggle behind Mathias. Morser is still totally involved with that eiderdown. Mathias knows that “Torps” will certainly be a first draft Mad Lib choice for noun this evening, while Dunajski is probably showering for another night at Eliot's.

“Jim...”

“What? I can say 'boobs'. The FCC allows it. If it's on public radio than we can say it here man. Admit it. All the Jewish girls around here have got chest action.”

Mathias doesn't know how to respond to this. He feigns belief that this is a compliment to his ethnicity, so the kids don't catch P.T. and him in an altercation, verbal or otherwise.

“Thanks.”

“Oy. Vey.”

“Uh-Huh.”

Mathias is thinking about how this kind of banter wasn't in the job description. How did someone like P.T. get hired here anyway? He stops swinging and pulls himself up again one, two and three times.

“She's a former camper isn't she?”

“Yes. She was here like six years ago.”

“What was she like?” asks Dunajski. He now his right hand inside his boxers and is scratching the inside of his leg.

“The same.”

“Smaller?” Dunajski now retrieves the hand and smells it, putting his middle and index finger under his nostrils.

“I guess.”

“What about Johnson?”

“Katie Johnson? From California? Is she with the Quaternions?” Mathias doesn't even think he's spoken one word to Katie Johnson since an orientation dinner where they were forced to sit together at a table and exchange brief info about their cabin, age group , home state and teaching area. He's surprised he remembered everything except the cabin name. “How would I know?”

“I mean Czerniak. Czerniak? She was here too?”

“Yes. I don't remember if she's the same,” he lies. He remembers fourteen year old Kat Czerniak perfectly. She looked exactly the same as she does today. Same hair and big eyes. And she had that same freckled chipmunk smile. He remembers her breasts, they were about as big as now, but she didn't walk with that cool amble that makes them pan from side to side. She even wore the same headband all the time. Mathias wonders for a second about his dumping her for Rachel Hoffman.

“Rach Hoffman has some serious torps.”

“We've covered that.”

“In Canada? At the place I work throughout the year, there are only like fifteen girls there. And it's isolated from everything else. The closest town is like forty minutes away. Tops.”

This is when McAvoy thinks P.T. is a chronic liar, during these wistful stories.

“Anyways, there aren't as many choices. And there's more guys. So you have to choose and make your move right away. With chicks. I've learned how to move quickly that way.”

“Really,” Mathias says.

“You know whose hot?” asks Dunajski, “And the kids agree with me on this. We put it to a vote.”

“Who?”

“Jan.”

“Janice Snedecker? From Vanuatu? The climbing wall chick?”

“Yeah. Oh yeah.”

The only serious interaction or face time Mathias has had with Jan Snedecker was on the first night he arrived at Almspoint. Rodney had taken the fifteen or so counselors that arrived early for training or pre-camp and brought them to Pizza Hut and the Cinemark movie complex in Hadley. Mathias sat next to Jan at Pizza Hut and she introduced herself. She deliberated between a Samuel Adams and an Apple Cider brew they had bottled, while he observed all the others at the table and tried to learn their names, she kept on about how bitter the lager was in New England. He remembers how close she sat to him, and how he was frazzled and nervous from the trip out and meeting everybody. He had purposefully tried to be a bit of a braggart to throw her off from his tension. If she had made him hold his palm out, it would have quaked, insurgent to his brain's command. Snedecker sat next to him again all through the Ben Affleck movie Sum Of All Fears. She thought it was awesome. Mathias Ennes' very own sobriquet for Janice Snedecker is The Valkyrie, which he has yet to share with any of his peers here.

“Not my type. Abrasive. And jacked. Like Madonna or something. I think her Dad is a four star general. A former commander of NATO ground forces.”

“Hey look, she may not be as stacked as Czerniak but she's totally gorgeous.”

“You said Hoffman was the stacked one.”

“Sure. Sure. They're both Jewish. Well who do you think is the hottie then?”

“Well obviously I'm going to lean towards Rachel. But Elizabeth Dover is cute.”

“Elizabeth Dover...” says Dunajski, “She's a former camper too.”

“Uh... yes.”

“I'm just saying: I've learned how to move quickly that way.”

Mathias drops from the beam with a thud on the cabin floor. He barely stays balanced. His arms feel like melting rubber. He closes his eyes and can feel actual drops of his flesh, liquefied, dripping off his fingers to the floor. He opens his eyes back and looks at his hands. They're red and pulsing now that he turns the arms over. And there are splinters of wood, not piercing him, but on his palms.

“Jim. You're on Adam's bed,” Mathias says. “We have three minutes until Cove and he hasn't been able to clean his area yet.”

“I was just going to say something to him about that.”

Dunajski gets up and grabs a crusty Gold Bond shaker off his cubby.

“Try to give him a hand,” Mathias says, not wanting to get into how absurd Dunajski's deflection is. “Adam. Jim's going to help you make your bed. Get to it. Remember to turn the bed down.”

Margolis and Xalfas run over to Dunajski, who is applying the Gold Bond to his genitals. He instructs them to hold out their palms and then pats the back of the shaker so the white powder lads in their hands. The boys are ecstatic. They unzip their pants and pull their underwear bands out, dumping the powder inside, without touching themselves, nowhere near as audacious as Dunajski's maneuver. They zip back up and then do a little shuffle where they swing their hips back and forth wildly, supposedly dispersing the powder.

“Hey Mathias?” asks Adam Margolis. “You're a former camper. Are you Jewish?”

“Well my Mom is. So technically yes,” says Mathias.

“Do you stay kosher?”

“He's an atheist Adam,” says Dunajski, finally starting to pick up Margolis' bed spread and pillow.

“I'm not an atheist. I'm agnostic,” Mathias snaps at him.

“What's agnostic?” asks Sol Schuster, now standing in the door frame between the wing and main partition.

“It's... agnostic is...” he is straining here, Mathias doesn't want to talk too much about this. “...when you believe in God, but you just don't think it's possible to definitely know there's a God. So I don't actually practice organized religion.”

“He doesn't have any faith,” Dunajski interjects.

“That's not true. It's just...” Mathias looks around and realizes both McAvoy and Rob Eaton are stopped in the main partition, they've been eavesdropping on the whole Stand On Principle play, which in retrospect didn't go so well. Most of the campers: Margolis, Xalfas, Morser, Schuster, Levine, Rosen and Juspeczyk are listening attentively. Mathias doesn't have a clue where Posner and Bachrach are. Good. Bachrach would really take this and run with it. Then, Mathias walks over to Dunajski, practically bowling over Xalfas and Margolis who are still swaying back and forth, spreading Gold Bond into their perineums. Mathias gets really close to Dunajski, totally breaking the guy's personal bubble.

“Look, Jim I don't think we should talk about this,” he murmurs, “Rodney wouldn't like it. It's inappropriate.”

Mathias walks away, back through the main partition, past McAvoy and Eaton, into his wing. He can hear P.T. whispering to Margolis and Xalfas that he'll explain agnostic to them later. He slumps onto his bed. Darren Bachrach comes in through the side door between his and Mathias' areas. He's zipping up the fly to his khaki shorts.

“Don't look!” he says loudly. “You're 42% gay. I just had to take a whazzer.”

Bachrach's been urinating off the side cabin steps since the first morning they arrived, leaving puddles the other boys have to tip toe and side step around to get out and to their morning activities.

“Mathias tried to look at my penis!” yells Bachrach.

“Hey Darren!” yells P.T., all the way from his wing, with that Canadian articulation so that it sounds like Durrn. He's holding up the Gold Bond shaker, label first. “What do you think would happen if a girl put Gold Bond on her you-know-where?”

And everyone, all nine campers, Ben McAvoy, Jim P.T. Dunajski, even Rob Eaton – everyone but Mathias lets out a collective, groaning, “Awwwwwwwwwww!!!!!”

They start to congregate in the main partition. P.T. is telling a story about back home in Canada and how this one time he bet a girl ten dollars that she wouldn't smother her vagina (even P.T. has the sense to talk in code here and refers to it as her “bouquet”) in a measuring cup of Gold Bond, and when she took him up on it, she shrieked in pain, because it burned her insides so abusively that she was spasming from the waist down, and that Dunajski and his bros had to carry her from their campsite to Dunajski's pick-up, in which Dunajski drove her to the closest E.R., an hour and a half away, where the resident male Doctor on duty at that late hour was so absolutely horrified at what they had done to her, he apparently forgot about Dunajski being there and Dunajski watched salaciously (Mathias imagines) as they cut the jeans and panties away from this poor, deceived, hopefully fictional girl and Dunajski saw her whole entire bouquet, vase and all, from the waist down, her bouquet being scorched and red as the most melanomic of sunburns and morbidly blistered, with patches of the Gold Bond powder packed together like mud on her inner thighs, and this, and apparently only this, was what Dunajski found to be so putrid that he then left the room, the caked on powder. He actually uses the word putrid, surprising Mathias.

Mathias is totally disgusted and thinks there is no way this yarn can be true. McAvoy and Eaton, despite being generally good guys, are intensely hypnotized by Dunajski's every word since the wink-and-nudge of bouquet. This is what Eaton meant by triangulation, thinks Mathias. He wouldn't be surprised if they were both semi-erect right now.

Mathias reaches under his bed and pulls out the gray, stained, postal office knapsack that he keeps some personal belongings in. Bachrach has joked about how there are several craniums of previous Almspoint campers in the knapsack, to which Mathias replied not at all. He locks the sack with a hard metal combo lock, the keys to which are on his car key chain that he carries with him everywhere, even the swim docks, despite not having brought his parent's car out here to Greenwich. Inside the sack there is actually only an extra blanket, some Maxim and Jane magazines Mathias' sister Jenna mailed him, a black and red baja and Mathias' dream journal.

The journal is something Mathias started after a Boston University professor for American Literature: Post Civil War had insisted that all her students keep a journal, even if the contents of which had nothing to do with literary endeavors. Mathias is not the kind of person who condenses his daily thoughts enough to remark on them in such a journal in the evenings. He finds that sort of habit to be trivial. But he does have an abundantly active dream life, so vivid that he is able to recollect the details every morning, until they gradually fade through breakfast. He writes every dream down and has them recorded all the way back to that second semester of his freshman year in which he'd taken the course. He thinks a dream journal is more personal and telling of what was going on in his life at that time anyways. The journal is an exquisitely third-world type product that his aunt picked up for him at the Cambridge branch of One Thousand Villages, made from the bark and pulp of Nepalese Daphne bush. The paper is so sensitive that he can only write on one side of each page because the ink bleeds through and makes writing on the opposite side produce illegible effects such that everything previously written would also be unreadable.

He peruses the journal while the others are still fawning over P.T. and stops on June eighth, this being the dream he had after his arrival at Almspoint, plus the Pizza Hut and movie, with various beers factored in throughout the evening. The entry reads as such:

“I am a part of a two-dimensional website camera viewer that moves around a very old English looking library that The Valkyrie owns and runs. She looks like a young Helen Mirren I realize. And the camera pans to different books on magical lore and very old alchemics. Throughout the nightmare I am deathly afraid of having a wet dream. The Valkyrie will smell it and punish me. The camera finally zooms on an inner window covered in black metal grating, behind which lies her witches hat. The camera (me) zooms, the window opens and the hat leaps up, changing into a vampiric bat and then attacks and envelopes my own face/lens.”

Mathias slaps the book shut, locks it's bamboo latches and looks at the wind-up clock that he keeps under his caseless pillow. There is a minute until Morning Cove, at which all the different age groups meet in their respective cove areas and discuss peer workshops available that day, the daily schedule, and what is for lunch and dinner. Tristand Da Cuhna is the oldest cabin of the youngest boys group, The Quarks. Quark campus leader Tim Mikaljon also throws in basketball, baseball, hockey and even some NASCAR scores -- at which all of the campers boo or cheer their respective hometown favorites or enemies -- and sometimes he'll do a pop quiz with arcane video game questions like: “How many versions of Megaman have been made available, across different platforms, since it's inception?” The rare winners of such questions receive an abstract number of points, the camper with the highest abstract number winning a signed ticket by Gray Gerry O'Grady, the entirely fictional third baseman for the equally fictional minor league Amherst Smallpox Blankets. Mikaljon gives such outstanding and impossible scores for this team every morning that counselors and campers a like go totally jubilant over what should be the Blankets' surefire rise to the Majors.

The bell rings from the steeple on the top of the Camp Almspoint barn, between the Atlantic and Pacific campuses. Sol Schuster and Josh Posner break into a sprint out the main door of Tristan Da Cuhna, racing down the path between Flakstad and Svalbard that leads to the Quark Cove area, beside the swimming docks on Lake Coldbrook. P.T. is gone too, he likes to get there early because he hates to have to hustle with the slower kids, preferring to high five and gossip to his buddies about the facial action he received in the parking lot behind Eliot's last night. Adam Margolis, Eric Xalfas, Ross Morser, Dennis Levine, Darren Bachrach and even Sid Rosen all take their time grabbing swim suits and tennis rackets, beach towels and bug spray, but leave the cabin together in a multiple squall of Torps, Squirnums and Bouquets. McAvoy walks with them, he barely bends his knees when he walks, quite odd for a tennis player, he almost waddles like a penguin.

Gazing out the window after McAvoy and the campers, Mathias sees a golf cart with miscellaneous cleaning tools and the two stunning and unusually cosmopolitan Polish cleaning girls pulling up by Bioko cabin. They're both dirty blondes, with new, bronze tans from their afternoon trips to the public beach down the shore from Almspoint. Mathias sees them there everyday, from the swim docks. He doesn't know the shorter one's name, but the leggy, pouty, international debutante of Warsaw is called Magda. She's the one who clued him into the whole Warsaw Pact thing for Juspeczyk's amusement. He imagines that Magda has a serious dislike for all of the men and boys whose grotesque trash and dirt she has to clean. Secretly she probably loathes him. It's her job to unplug the toilets when one of the Quarks uses too much toilet paper and clogs a stall, even when it sits in the summer sun for hours, sometimes a whole day, before her rounds. She cleans up their feces. And yet she's totally unattainable. He watches her jump out of the cart and rush into Tristan with an empty trash bag, flipping her gossamer hair back subconsciously. She smiles slightly when she sees him, watching her change trash bags in their barrel. He's brooding from the encounter with P.T. and knows he looks a little scary and intimidating right now on his bed, when he should be at Cove.

Rob Eaton is patiently trying to get Jonah Juspeczyk to put his breathable Adidas pants and cleats on. They're not going to get a Satisfactory today. Juspeczyk's bed is still a whirlwind of sheets and hockey pads; turning the bed down has ceased to be an option. But his Metacoid is covered, the fleece blanket arranged just so precariously that Juspeczyk will know if any of the others return and touch it because of where he's arranged the four corners. It's under there though, it's azure oceans raging, the milleflori converge on terra cotta colored terra incognita forming whole cities of fused crystal and brittle metal populated by inhabitants the size of electrons. Mathias remembers the dark purplish tumor in the Metacoid's northern hemisphere, it's molten glass branching out like circulatory veins. He supposes if they lived on a Mega Megaplanet, it would be there, inside the cumulus of that dark and forgotten tropic.