“What is it?” I asked. I was no longer cold or weirded out by the look
he had given me. I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
“Come and see,”

It was awkward to get into, that much technotronics he admitted once we were both
inside the hole. But I was so amazed by how he had made a chimney that
would draw smoke out if he ever chose to build a fire that the
awkwardness of getting in and out of the hole wasn’t even on my mind.
You could add to that that escape wasn’t a concept I had any real
experience with. The worst I’d had to escape was Artie, a strangelooking
kid at school whose father was a mortician. He liked to pretend
he was carrying a needle full of embalming fluid around with him. On his
notebooks he would draw needles spilling dark drips.

“This is neato!” I said to Mr. Harvey. He could have been the
hunchback of Notre Dame, whom we had read about in French class. I
didn’t care. I completely reverted. I was my brother Buckley on our daytrip
to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he’d fallen in
love with the huge skeletons on display. I hadn’t used the word neato in
public since elementary school.