I imagined Isaac staying. Trading in his clothes for ours. Getting his sheep-shear haircut. Learning how to make leather or drive the tractor or melt down old bullets and re-form them. But Isaac had never been particularly interested in animals or nature or climate change. He liked art-making, he wanted to travel and see the world. He liked his definite self, his point of view: that was why we’d broken up. I knew he would not stay. The fake world was built for people like him, not people like me.

* * *

The next day, Isaac arrived at breakfast looking exhausted. “I kept dreaming about vultures,” he said.

I let Osha and others entertain him with stories about panthers and swarming bees. He leaned his head on his hand and winced at his bitter tea. I felt sorry for him. In Durham, he’d appeared to be a radical. Strange to realize I’d surpassed him there.

Sara told Isaac and me to go scoop out the four-person outhouse down below the long house, down where Pear used to park her car. I found Isaac some work boots to replace his shoes, and [[p223]]he complained that they were too stiff. The outhouse was a rickety shack with six wooden steps leading up to the four stalls. An old flag, originally the North Carolina one, flapped over the front entrance; a breeze blew it northward all day and night. The pit below was deep but still needed emptying once a year. Someone had to wheel its contents down to the humanure pile, leave it to the microorganisms for another year, then spread it through the garden, to make the tomatoes glow.

We pinned mint in our hair to repel gnats. We needed some muscle to open up the ground-level door. The smell made us both retch. We stabbed our heavy shovels into the mass, slopped it into our manure barrow. But after a minute we noticed something strange: below the top layer, which still looked and smelled like human waste, the mound was crumbly and black like flowerpot soil. I never realized how quickly waste decomposes. In the fake world, we either whisked it through the plumbing or stepped around it on the street, but if we just left it a week, waste would return to the earth. The cleaner things seem, the dirtier they are. The dirtier things seem, the cleaner they are. “It’s not bad,” Isaac said. He was learning the Ash Family’s lessons, the red-lens-blue-lens, the tiny globe caught between magnets.

* * *

We spent two hours on the task, making hardly any progress, and Isaac’s hands blistered, and our boots caked over. Isaac wanted to return to the house for a shower, but I told him we should shower later. I didn’t want him to confront our one-shower-a-week policy.

“Well, let’s at least do something else,” Isaac said stiffly. He suggested a walk.

“Let’s check with Osha,” I said.