UnWholly

As for Pastor Dan, he’s a hero to Lev for having the courage to lose his convictions without losing his faith. “I still believe in God,” Pastor Dan told him, “just not a God who condones human tithing.” And in tears, Lev asked if he could believe in that God too, never having realized he had such a choice.

Dan, who no one but Lev calls “Pastor” anymore, listed himself as a nondenominational cleric on the form they had to fill out before they began meeting with kids at the detention center.

“So then what religion are we?” Lev asks him each week as they walk in. The question has become a ru

“We’re Pentupcostal because we’re sick of all the hypocrisy.”

“We’re Clueish, because we finally got a clue.”

“We’re PresbyPterodactyl, because we’re making this whole thing fly against all reason.”

But Lev’s favorite was, “We’re Leviathan, because what happened to you, Lev, is at the heart of it all.”

It made him feel both terribly uncomfortable and also a little bit blessed to be at the core of a spiritual movement, even if it was only a movement of two.

“Isn’t a leviathan a big, ugly monster?” he pointed out.

“Yes,” said Pastor Dan, “so let’s hope you never become one.”

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 fu

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 ru

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?”

“You know how you get.”

“No,” Lev says a bit coldly. “Tell me how I get.”

But Marcus doesn’t have to, because Lev knows exactly what he means.

The first letter from Cousin Carl was a complete mystery at first, until Lev realized it was a coded message from Co

“So what does he say?” Lev asks Marcus.

“It’s addressed to you. Believe it or not, I don’t read your mail.”

When they arrive home, Marcus hands the letter to him but holds it out of reach for a moment. “Promise me you won’t go into some black-hole brooding funk where you sit and do nothing but play video games for a week.”