The Troop

From Troop 52:

Legacy of the Modified Hydatid

(AS PUBLISHED IN GQ MAGAZINE) BY CHRIS PACKER:

MAX KIRKWOOD IS the oldest-looking fifteen-year-old you’ll ever see.

His eyes fade into his head and their edges are knitted with wrinkles. His hair has a stripped-out, mousy aspect. There is a pronounced stoop when he sits down: his shoulders are rounded and hunched in a gait one associates with the elderly. He looks like someone who has been subjected to unimaginable pressures and now, that pressure withdrawn, his body still bears the weight.

You have to remind yourself that Max is still a boy. But he’s a boy who has seen far more than most others his age.

We speak through an impermeable barrier at the clinic. It is not unlike the way inmates speak to their spouses in jail. There are phones on each side of the Plexiglas. After I finish, an orderly will wipe down the earpiece with a powerful germ-killer. The clinic operates at the highest levels of precaution. It took months of wrangling and compromise to secure a brief interview with Max.

The clinic itself is a gargantuan boxy structure far removed from any population center. The things inside the clinic are potentially lethal to humankind. The humans who reside in the clinic aren’t dangerous—what may be thriving inside of them, though, are very dangerous. The viruses and contagions and parasites. The worms.

Max is in good spirits today. He’s wearing a paper gown and slippers. He tells me that everything is burned after he wears it, as a precaution.

“When you get a whole new wardrobe every day, I guess it’s best that they’re made out of paper,” he says with a wry smile.

Max Kirkwood was spared. His fellow troop-mate Newton Thornton was not. Why? That is as yet unknown. Recent revelations at the tribunal trial of Admiral Stonewall Brewer—chief tactical commander of the Falstaff Island event—indicate that the thinking may’ve been that Max would be a good candidate for study. There is a possibility he was spared because if not, there would have been nobody left to gauge the effectiveness of the worm. It is shocking to believe such thinking may prevail at the upper echelons of the military establishment.

Max is well clear of that now. In fact he seems to remember little of his experience on Falstaff Island. It is entirely possible, of course, that he doesn’t want to remember—that his mind, seeking peace, has simply jettisoned these memories. Who could blame him if that is the case?

He speaks about the others in clipped, jagged sentences. They are the only aspects of the ordeal that he claims to truly recall, and by and large he recalls them with great fondness and care.

Of Tim Riggs, his Scoutmaster: “Dr. Riggs was the coolest adult I ever knew. But he didn’t try hard to be cool. He was actually sort of not-cool, with the way he dressed and his fussiness. But he was cool because he treated us the way he’d treat grown-ups.”

Of Ephraim Elliot: “Eef was my best friend. You could count on Eef. He always stuck up for you. He had a really big heart. I just think that, on the island, something crawled into his head and he couldn’t get rid of it.”

Of Kent Jenks: “I still have a hard time believing he’s gone. I mean, he was like Superman—really, he was. If anyone could have swum back to North Point, it was Big K.”

Of Shelley Longpre: “There was something the matter with him. I’m not so sad about Shel, to be honest. That’s a shitty thing to say, but whatever.”

Of Newton: “Newt would have been a great dad. The best, I just know it. He knew so much. The strongest of any of us. I really wish we hadn’t ragged on him so bad.”

When I ask him what else he can remember, his face grows distant, as if his mind is sprinting away from my question.

“There was a turtle,” he says finally.

He grows silent. Then the words pour out in a shocking flood.

“Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it’s hopeless. It’s like the end is always there, you can’t escape it, but things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything’s been stripped away. Their bodies and happiness and hope. Things just don’t know when to die. I wish they did. I wish my friends had known that. Sort of, anyway. But I’m glad they tried. That’s part of being human, right? Part of being any living thing. You hold on to life until it gets ripped away from you. Even if it gets ripped away in pieces. You just hold on.”

He grows silent. His head dips. When he looks up again his eyes are red at their edges and he’s near tears.

“I killed a turtle,” he says simply.

It seems the most wretched admission he’s ever made. I want to reach out and hug him—but I can’t because a thick barrier prevents it and anyway, there may still be something inside of Max that could kill me.

An orderly leads me away shortly after this. Max has been overstimulated. He needs to cool down.

I walk out to my car. The sky is gray with the threat of rain. I try to put myself in Max’s shoes on that island. I picture being confronted with a faceless hungering threat that he never truly understood. And it amazes me that he—that all the boys—hung tough together. They didn’t abandon each other—maybe it never entered their minds that they could. Those ideas come with the dawn of adulthood, and all the cruelties implicit in that stage of life.