UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

Lev is never going to become a big anything. The reason why he doesn’t quite look fourteen is more than just looking young for his age. In the weeks after his capture, he endured transfusion after transfusion to clean out his blood, but poisoning his body with explosive compounds had damaged him. For weeks Lev’s body was bound in puffy cotton gauze like a mummy, yet with arms stretched wide to keep him from detonating himself.

“You’ve been cruci-fluffed,” Pastor Dan told him. At the time, Lev didn’t find it very funny.

His doctor tried to mask his disdain for Lev by hiding it behind a cold, clinical demeanor.

“Even when we purge your system of the chemicals,” the doctor said, “they’ll take their toll.” Then he’d chuckled bitterly. “You’ll live, but you’ll never be unwound. You have just enough damage to your organs to make them useless to anybody but you.”

The damage also stunted his growth, as well as his physical development. Now Lev’s body is perpetually trapped at the age of thirteen. The wage of being a clapper who doesn’t clap. The only thing that will still grow is his hair—and he made a conscious decision that he would just let it grow, never again becoming the clean-cut, easily manipulated boy he had once been.

Luckily, the worst predictions didn’t come true. He was told he would have permanent tremors in his hands and a slur in his speech. Didn’t happen. He was told that his muscles would atrophy and he’d become increasingly weak. Didn’t happen. In fact, regular exercise, while it hasn’t bulked him up like some, has left him with fairly normal muscle tone. True, he’ll never be the boy he could have been—but then, he would never have been that boy anyway. He would have been unwound. All things considered, this is a better option.

And he doesn’t mind spending his Sundays talking to kids who, once upon a time, he would have been afraid of.

“Dude,” the tattooed punk whispers, leaning over the rec room table and pushing some stray puzzle pieces to the floor. “Just tell me—what was it like at harvest camp?”

Lev looks up, catching a security camera trained on the table. There’s one trained on every table, every conversation. In this way, it’s not all that different from harvest camp.

“Like I said, I can’t talk about it,” Lev tells him. “But trust me, you want to stay clean till seventeen, because you don’t want to find out.”

“I hear ya,” says the punk. “Clean till seventeen—that oughta be the motto.” And he leans back, looking at Lev with the kind of admiration Lev doesn’t feel he’s earned.

When visiting hours are over, Lev leaves with his former pastor.

“Productive?” Dan asks.

“Can’t tell. Maybe.”

“Maybe’s better than not at all. A good day’s work for a nice Clueish boy.”

- - -

There’s a jogging path in downtown Cleveland that runs along the marina on Lake Erie. It curves around the Great Lakes Science Center and along the back side of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where the memories of those who are notorious for rebellion far hipper than Lev’s are immortalized. Lev jogs past it every Sunday afternoon, wondering what it must be like to be both famous and infamous, yet more adored than hated, more admired than pitied. He shudders to think what type of museum exhibit would feature him, and hopes he never finds out.

It’s relatively warm for February. Temperatures in the forties. Rain instead of snow that morning, and a dreary afternoon drizzle instead of flurries. Marcus runs along with him, winded, his breath coming in puffs of steam.

“Do you have to run so fast?” he calls after Lev. “It’s not a race. And anyway, it’s raining.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“You could slip and lose control—there are still slushy spots.”

“I’m not a car.”

Lev splashes through a slush puddle, splattering Marcus, and grins while his brother curses. Years of fast food and endlessly hitting the books in law school has left Marcus not exactly flabby, but certainly out of shape.

“I swear, if you keep showing me up, I won’t run with you anymore. I’ll call the feds back in. They always keep up with you.”

Ironically, it had been Marcus’s idea that Lev begin an exercise routine once he was released into his brother’s custody. In those early days of recovery, when his blood was still poisoned, just getting up and down the stairs in Marcus’s town house was a workout for Lev—but Marcus had the vision to see that the rehabilitation of Lev’s soul was closely tied to rehabilitating his body. For many weeks it had been Marcus pushing Lev to cover just one more block. And yes, when he first began, there were G-men escorting him. At first they escorted him everywhere on his Sundays out, perhaps to show that there was no leniency to house arrest. Eventually they began to trust the tracking chip and allowed Lev to be out without an official escort, as long as either Dan or Marcus was with him.

“If I have a heart attack, it’ll have your name all over it!” Marcus calls from farther back.

Lev was never a distance runner. Once upon a time, he was all about baseball; a real team player. Now a more individual sport suits him.

As the rain gets heavier, he stops, only halfway through the run, and lets Marcus catch up with him. They buy Aquafina from a die-hard vendor outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who’ll probably still be selling bottled water and Red Bull as the world is ending.

Marcus catches his breath as he drinks, then mentions casually, “You got a letter from Cousin Carl yesterday.”

Lev holds his reaction inside, giving no outward indication that this is any big deal. “If it came yesterday, why are you telling me today?”