“Bean, do you understand what you’re telling me? That you were doing all this before you were a year old?”

  “You’re the one who said how old I was,” said Bean. “I didn’t know about ages then. You told me to remember. The more I tell you, the more comes back to me. But if you don’t believe me . . .”

  “I just . . . I do believe you. But who were the other children? What was the place where you lived, that clean place? Who were those grownups? Why did they take away the other children? Something illegal was going on, that’s certain.”

  “Whatever,” said Bean. “I was just glad to get out of the toilet.”

  “But you were naked, you said. And you left the place?”

  “No, I got found. I came out of the toilet and a grownup found me.”

  “What happened?”

  “He took me home. That’s how I got clothing. I called them clothings then.”

  “You were talking.”

  “Some.”

  “And this grownup took you home and bought you clothing.”

  “I think he was a janitor. I know more about jobs now and I think that’s what he was. It was night when he worked, and he didn’t wear a uniform like a guard.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s when I first found out about legal and illegal. It wasn’t legal for him to have a child. I heard him yelling at this woman about me and most of it I didn’t understand, but at the end I knew he had lost and she had won, and he started talking to me about how I had to go away, and so I went.”

  “He just turned you loose in the streets?”

  “No, I left. I think now he was going to have to give me to somebody else, and it sounded scary, so I left before he could do it. But I wasn’t naked or hungry anymore. He was nice. After I left I bet he didn’t have any more trouble.”

  “And that’s when you started living on the streets.”

  “Sort of. A couple of places I found, they fed me. But every time, other kids, big ones, would see that I was getting fed and they’d come shouting and begging and the people would stop feeding me or the bigger kids would shove me out of the way or take the food right out of my hands. I was scared. One time a big kid got so mad at me for eating that he put a stick down my throat and made me throw up what I just ate, right on the street. He even tried to eat it but he couldn’t, it made him try to throw up, too. That was the scariest time. I hided all the time after that. Hid. All the time.”

  “And starved.”

  “And watched,” said Bean. “I ate some. Now and then. I didn’t die.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I saw plenty who did. Lots of dead children. Big ones and little ones. I kept wondering how many of them were from the clean place.”

  “Did you recognize any of them?”

  “No. Nobody looked like they ever lived in the clean place. Everybody looked hungry.”

  “Bean, thank you for telling me all this.”

  “You asked.”

  “Do you realize that there is no way you could have survived for three years as an infant?”

  “I guess that means I’m dead.”

  “I just . . . I’m saying that God must have been watching over you.”

  “Yeah. Well, sure. So why didn’t he watch over all those dead kids?”

  “He took them to his heart and loved them.”

  “So then he didn’t love me?”

  “No, he loved you too, he—”

  “Cause if he was watching so careful, he could have given me something to eat now and then.”

  “He brought me to you. He has some great purpose in mind for you, Bean. You may not know what it is, but God didn’t keep you alive so miraculously for no reason.”

  Bean was tired of talking about this. She looked so happy when she talked about God, but he hadn’t figured it out yet, what God even was. It was like, she wanted to give God credit for every good thing, but when it was bad, then she either didn’t mention God or had some reason why it was a good thing after all. As far as Bean could see, though, the dead kids would rather have been alive, just with more food. If God loved them so much, and he could do whatever he wanted, then why wasn’t there more food for these kids? And if God just wanted them dead, why didn’t he let them die sooner or not even be born at all, so they didn’t have to go to so much trouble and get all excited about trying to be alive when he was just going to take them to his heart. None of it made any sense to Bean, and the more Sister Carlotta explained it, the less he understood it. Because if there was somebody in charge, then he ought to be fair, and if he wasn’t fair, then why should Sister Carlotta be so happy that he was in charge?

  But when he tried to say things like that to her, she got really upset and talked even more about God and used words he didn’t know and it was better just to let her say what she wanted and not argue.

  It was the reading that fascinated him. And the numbers. He loved that. Having paper and pencil so he could actually write things, that was really good.

  And maps. She didn’t teach him maps at first, but there were some on the walls and the shapes of them fascinated him. He would go up to them and read the little words written on them and one day he saw the name of the river and realized that the blue was rivers and even bigger blue areas were places with even more water than the river, and then he realized that some of the other words were the same names that had been written on the street signs and so he figured out that somehow this thing was a picture of Rotterdam, and then it all made sense. Rotterdam the way it would look to a bird, if the buildings were all invisible and the streets were all empty. He found where the nest was, and where Poke had died, and all kinds of other places.

  When Sister Carlotta found out that he understood the map, she got very excited. She showed him maps where Rotterdam was just a little patch of lines, and one where it was just a dot, and one where it was too small even to be seen, but she knew where it would be. Bean had never realized the world was so big. Or that there were so many people.

  But Sister Carlotta kept coming back to the Rotterdam map, trying to get him to remember where things from his earliest memories were. Nothing looked the same, though, on the map, so it wasn’t easy, and it took a long time for him to figure out where some of the places were where people had fed him. He showed these to Sister Carlotta, and she made a mark right on the map, showing each place. And after a while he realized—all those places were grouped in one area, but kind of strung out, as if they marked a path from where he found Poke leading back through time to . . .

  To the clean place.

  Only that was too hard. He had been too scared, coming out of the clean place with the janitor. He didn’t know where it was. And the truth was, as Sister Carlotta herself said, the janitor might have lived anywhere compared to the clean place. So all she was going to find by following Bean’s path backward was maybe the janitor’s flat, or at least where he lived three years ago. And even then, what would the janitor know?

  He would know where the clean place was, that’s what he’d know. And now Bean understood: It was very important to Sister Carlotta to find out where Bean came from.

  To find out who he really was.

  Only . . . he already knew who he really was. He tried to say this to her. “I’m right here. This is who I really am. I’m not pretending.”

  “I know that,” she said, laughing, and she hugged him, which was all right. It felt good. Back when she first started doing it, he didn’t know what to do with his hands. She had to show him how to hug her back. He had seen some little kids—the ones with mamas or papas—doing that but he always thought they were holding on tight so they wouldn’t drop off onto the street and get lost. He didn’t know that you did it just because it felt good. Sister Carlotta’s body had hard places and squishy places and it was very strange to hug her. He thought of Poke and Achilles hugging and kissing, but he didn’t want to kiss Sister Carlotta and after he got used to what hugging was, he didn’t really want to do that either. He let her hug him. But he didn’t ever think of hugging her himself. It just didn’t come into his mind.

  He knew that sometimes she hugged him instead of explaining things to him, and he didn’t like that. She didn’t want to tell him why it mattered that she find the clean place, so she hugged him and said, “Oh, you dear thing,” or “Oh, you poor boy.” But that only meant that it was even more important than she was saying, and she thought he was too stupid or ignorant to understand if she tried to explain.

  He kept trying to remember more and more, if he could, only now he didn’t tell her everything because she didn’t tell him everything and fair was fair. He would find the clean room himself. Without her. And then tell her if he decided it would be good for him to have her know. Because what if she found the wrong answer? Would she put him back on the street? Would she keep him from going to school in the sky? Because that’s what she promised at first, only after the tests she said he did very well only he would not go in the sky until he was five and maybe not even then because it was not entirely her decision and that’s when he knew that she didn’t have the power to keep her own promises. So if she found out the wrong thing about him, she might not be able to keep any of her promises. Not even the one about keeping him safe from Achilles. That’s why he had to find out on his own.

  He studied the map. He pictured things in his mind. He talked to himself as he was falling asleep, talked and thought and remembered, trying to get the janitor’s face back into his mind, and the room he lived in, and the stairs outside where the mean lady stood to scream at him.

  And one day, when he thought he had remembered enough, Bean went to the toilet—he liked the toilets, he liked to make them flush even though it scared him to see things disappear like that—and instead of coming back to Sister Carlotta’s teaching place, he went the other way down the corridor and went right out the door onto the street and no one tried to stop him.

  That’s when he realized his mistake, though. He had been so busy trying to remember the janitor’s place that it never occurred to him that he had no idea where this place was on the map. And it wasn’t in a part of town that he knew. In fact, it hardly seemed like the same world. Instead of the street being full of people walking and pushing carts and riding bikes or skating to get from one place to another, the streets were almost empty, and there were cars parked everywhere. Not a single store, either. All houses and offices, or houses made into offices with little signs out front. The only building that was different was the very one he had just come out of. It was blocky and square and bigger than the others, but it had no sign out in front of it at all.

  He knew where he was going, but he didn’t know how to get there from here. And Sister Carlotta would start looking for him soon.

  His first thought was to hide, but then he remembered that she knew all about his story of hiding in the clean place, so she would also think of hiding and she would look for him in a hiding place close to the big building.

  So he ran. It surprised him how strong he was now. It felt like he could run as fast as a bird flying, and he didn’t get tired, he could run forever. All the way to the corner and around it onto another street.

  Then down another street, and another, until he would have been lost except he started out lost and when you start out completely lost, it’s hard to get loster. As he walked and trotted and jogged and ran up and down streets and alleys, he realized that all he had to do was find a canal or a stream and it would lead him to the river or to a place that he recognized. So the first bridge that went over water, he saw which way the water flowed and chose streets that would keep him close. It wasn’t as if he knew where he was yet, but at least he was following a plan.

  It worked. He came to the river and walked along it until he recognized, off in the distance and partly around a bend in the river, Maasboulevard, which led to the place where Poke was killed.

  The bend in the river—he knew it from the map. He knew where all of Sister Carlotta’s marks had been. He knew that he had to go through the place where he used to live on the streets in order to get past them and closer to the area where the janitor might have lived. And that wouldn’t be easy, because he would be known there, and Sister Carlotta might even have the cops looking for him and they would look there because that’s where all the street urchins were and they would expect him to become a street urchin again.

  What they were forgetting was that Bean wasn’t hungry anymore. And since he wasn’t hungry, he wasn’t in a hurry.

  He walked the long way around. Far from the river, far from the busy part of town where the urchins were. Whenever the streets started looking crowded he would widen his circle and stay away from the busy places. He took the rest of that day and most of the next making such a wide circle that for a while he was not in Rotterdam anymore at all, and he saw some of the countryside, just like the pictures—farmland and the roads built up higher than the land around them. Sister Carlotta had explained to him once that most of the farmland was lower than the level of the sea, and great dikes were the only thing keeping the sea from rushing back onto the land and covering it. But Bean knew that he would never get close to any of the big dikes. Not by walking, anyway.

  He drifted back into town now, into the Schiebroek district, and late in the afternoon of the second day he recognized the name of Rindijk Straat and soon found a cross street whose name he knew, Erasmus Singel, and then it was easy to get to the earliest place he could remember, the back door of a restaurant where he had been fed when he was still a baby and didn’t talk right and grownups rushed to feed him and help him instead of kicking him out of the way.

  He stood there in the dusk. Nothing had changed. He could almost picture the woman with the little bowl of food, holding it out to him and waving a spoon in her hand and saying something in a language he didn’t understand. Now he could read the sign above the restaurant and realized that it was Armenian and that’s probably what the woman had been speaking.

  Which way had he walked to come here? He had smelled the food when he was walking along . . . here? He walked a little way up, a little way down the street, turning and turning to reorient himself.

  “What are you doing here, fatso?”

  It was two kids, maybe eight years old. Belligerent but not bullies. Probably part of a crew. No, part of a family, now that Achilles had changed everything. If the changes had spread to this part of town.

  “I’m supposed to meet my papa here,” said Bean.

  “And who’s your papa?”

  Bean wasn’t sure whether they took the word “papa” to mean his father or the papa of his “family.” He took the chance, though, of saying “Achilles.”

  They scoffed at the idea. “He’s way down by the river, why would he meet a fatso like you clear up here?”

  But their derision was not important—what mattered was that Achilles’ reputation had spread this far through the city.

  “I don’t have to explain his business to you,” said Bean. “And all the kids in Achilles’ family are fat like me. That’s how well we eat.”

  “Are they all short like you?”

  “I used to be taller, but I asked too many questions,” said Bean, pushing past them and walking across Rozenlaan toward the area where the janitor’s fiat seemed likeliest to be.

  They didn’t follow him. Such was the magic of Achilles’ name—or perhaps it was just Bean’s utter confidence, paying them no notice as if he had nothing to fear from them.

  Nothing looked familiar. He kept turning around and checking to see if he recognized things when looking in the direction he might have been going after leaving the janitor’s flat. It didn’t help. He wandered until it was dark, and kept wandering even then.

  Until, quite by chance, he found himself standing at the foot of a street lamp, trying to read a sign, when a set of initials carved on the pole caught his attention. PDVM, it said. He had no idea what it meant; he had never thought of it during all his attempts to remember; but he knew that he had seen it before. And not just once. He had seen it several times. The janitor’s flat was very close.

  He turned slowly, scanning the area, and there it was: A small apartment building with both an inside and an outside stairway.

  The janitor lived on the top floor. Ground floor, first floor, second floor, third. Bean went to the mailboxes and tried to read the names, but they were set too high on the wall and the names were all faded, and some of the tags were missing entirely.

  Not that he ever knew the janitor’s name, truth to tell. There was no reason to think he would have recognized it even if he had been able to read it on the mailbox.

  The outside stairway did not go all the way up to the top floor. It must have been built for a doctor’s office on the first floor. And because it was dark, the door at the top of the stairs was locked.

  There was nothing to do but wait. Either he would wait all night and get into the building through one entrance or another in the morning, or someone would come back in the night and Bean would slip through a door behind him.

  He fell asleep and woke up, slept and woke again. He worried that a policeman would see him and shove him away, so when he woke the second time he abandoned all pretense of being on watch and crept under the stairs and curled up there for the night.

  He was awakened by drunken laughter. It was still dark, and beginning to rain just a little—not enough to start dripping off the stairs, though, so Bean was dry. He stuck his head out to see who was laughing. It was a man and a woman, both merry with alcohol, the man furtively pawing and poking and pinching, the woman fending him off with halfhearted slaps. “Can’t you wait?” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “You’re just going to fall asleep without doing anything,” she said.

  “Not this time,” he said. Then he threw up.

  She looked disgusted and walked on without him. He staggered after her. “I feel better now,” he said. “It’ll be better.”

  “The price just went up,” she said coldly. “And you brush your teeth first.”