Awake in the World

by Jason Gurley

  We’d walked fairly far by now. At a crosswalk, Zach stopped and said, “You live in the hills, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I walk with you the whole way?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “I want to.”

  “Yes, please,” I said. As we crossed the street, I put my arm through his again. “So,” I said, picking up the thread where we’d left it. “Powers of Ten is this old experimental movie. I think it was made for IBM, or the government, or something.”

  “Sounds thrilling.”

  “It kind of is,” I said, “but not in the way you mean. Okay. Like, imagine that you’re looking down on two people, okay? They’re sitting on a blanket, having a picnic.”

  “Looking down?”

  “Like you’re the camera, and you’re just a meter above them. Looking right down on them.”

  “This sounds like a horror movie. Do they know I’m there?”

  I stopped walking. “It’s a concept thing. It’s about size. And how big or small things are.” I made a square with my fingers. “See, first you see these people from one meter up. Then the camera moves to ten meters up. You can still see the people, but they’re smaller now, and you can see even more of the park around them.” I widened the square. “Then it goes to a hundred meters, and you can see that the park is inside a city, right?”

  “I get it. Powers of ten. Like, literally. So next is—what, a thousand?”

  “A kilometer, yes. And the camera keeps getting farther and farther, right? Soon you can see the whole city, then the whole county. Then the state. Then North America. Then the whole planet.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “But it keeps going. It goes as far away as a hundred million light-years. It goes so far that the Milky Way is just this speck of dust.”

  “I can barely convert liters to gallons,” Zach confessed. “I don’t think I could handle meters to years.”

  “Light-years,” I corrected. We started walking again. “Okay, now the camera zooms all the way back to where we started. The blanket, the people. But here’s where it gets trippy: It keeps going. Like, a hundred centimeters. Then ten, then one, and soon you’re inside the people’s bodies. Subatomic. You can see a single atom inside the person.”

  “So it is a horror movie.”

  “I think everyone gets something different from it. For me, it’s like: The farther from home the camera goes, the more you realize how big and empty the universe is. How scary it is. Then it comes back, and it makes me think about how rare and precious all this is. You. Me. How many things had to line up perfectly for any of this to ever happen.”

  “That’s nice,” he said, but he appeared unconvinced. “For me, I think the camera would never move. You’d just see the couple, and every bad thing that could happen to them, no matter how ridiculous. Like, she spills the wine. That’s bad, right? But also: There’s an earthquake, and the ground opens up under them. Or a helicopter falls out of the sky and crashes right where they sit. Or—worse—they have to pee, and there are no bathrooms. Because all they can see is the blanket. They’re just trying to make the best of their blanket.”

  “I like how your worst-case scenario is no bathrooms,” I said.

  “I’m just saying, though. I can’t imagine all the unknowns. I only imagine the consequences of things I can see.” He sighed. “That’s why I saw the little girl, I guess. Imagine if I hadn’t. Those morons would have crushed her.”

  “Yeah, but Zach,” I insisted, certain he was missing the point. “More knowledge—seeing more—means fewer unknowns. More possibilities.”

  “No,” he said, resolutely. “More knowledge means even more and greater unknowns. I’m saying the knowns are absolutely all I can handle.”

  17

  Zach

  The whole way home, I thought about Vanessa’s house. House wasn’t even the right word. Small manor? An estate? The lawn was manicured and bright, even in the dark. There were orderly hedges, Japanese maples. Had there been a koi pond, I wouldn’t have been surprised. As we approached, I saw a glow in the open backyard: two figures sitting close beside a fire pit. “They’re pretending they’re just reclining with a bottle of wine,” Vanessa confided, “but really they’re watching us.” As she said this, one of the figures raised a glass. I waved back, sort of.

  At home, Mama’s door was open. Leah sat on the corner of Mama’s bed. I slipped into the room, and for a flicker of a moment, I thought Mama saw me. But it was just the light. I put my hand on her cheek and kissed her forehead. “Night, Mama.”

  In the hall, Leah whispered, “She heard you. Earlier, when you were home. She was unhappy you didn’t come see her. I told her you’d be back. You’d be proud, though. She was lucid almost ten minutes.” She gave me a hug, then disappeared into Mama’s room once more.

  Derek was in the kitchen, tugging his boots off. He nodded toward Mama’s closed door. “She all right today?”

  I shrugged. Sometimes it seemed we’d lost both our parents on that day, almost four years before. I looked around, trying to remember if the house had been better when Dad was still here. The kitchen linoleum sagged in places. The crack in the living room wall had grown longer. But most noticeable was Derek’s presence. If Dad were here …

  “How’d it go?” I asked. “The certification exam.”

  “Malfunction,” Derek said.

  I felt the air go out of me. Another delay would only mean prolonging the tension I knew he felt. “What kind of malfunction?”

  “The kind that meant the test was over,” Derek said. Then he grinned and said, “But they bumped the test back a couple hours and got it fixed. It’s why I’m late.”

  “And?”

  Though my brother was only twenty-eight, you’d hardly know it from the seams in his face. When he went a few days without shaving—like now—it added five years or more. It wasn’t only the job that did this to him. Worry was the sea we both sailed, never land in sight. But although his eyes were tired, they shone. “You’re looking at a Level One certified sat diver.”

  I whooped, then clapped my hands over my mouth.

  He laughed as I threw my arms around him, then patted my back: Time to end the hug, Zach, he meant. But I didn’t, not right away. “Dad would’ve been proud,” I said.

  I felt the muscles in his back tighten. “I don’t know about that.”

  “D,” I said. I was the big brother now. “He knew all the risks. So do you. You do what you do, and you both do it well.” I winced. “Did it well.”

  Through the walls, we heard our neighbor arrive home: a muffled clatter, the abrupt howl of his stereo. Leah came out of Mama’s room and stared sharply at the shared wall, then said, “That man is dumb as a bucket of bolts.” She shook her head, closed Mama’s door. “He’s lucky she’s asleep, or I’d go put my foot up his ass.”

  “He might like it,” I said, without thinking. They both stared at me.

  “With that,” Leah said, “I’m done. Don’t stay up too late.” She kissed my cheek, then turned to Derek. Her fingers lingered on his neck, and then she kissed him and hustled her way through the door.

  Derek held up a finger. “Listen.”

  A muted banging sounded upon our neighbor’s door.

  Derek grinned. “That poor bastard.”

  A moment later, the raucous music ceased. In the resulting quiet, I heard Leah’s car wheeze to life. “You really ought to marry that girl,” I observed.

  “She deserves better—”

  “Don’t be stupid. She knows what she wants. And so do you.”

  He picked up a pile of mail from the couch. As he paged through bill after bill, he said, “Jesus, it’s a good thing my hourly goes up.” He whacked the mail on one hand as if remembering something. “I was going to say, Z. You can quit working for Maddie. Enjoy your senior year. Before it’s gone, you know?”

  “Maddie needs me,” I said. And so do you. We both knew I’d keep the
job. Maybe with the extra money we could open a savings account for the first time.

  But he wasn’t listening. He’d come to a dove-gray envelope in the stack of bills. OCC&P was embossed in the corner.

  Ah, shit.

  “Lawyers call when they have good news,” Derek said. “They send mail with the bad.” He tossed me the envelope. I opened it and read it aloud:

  Dear Mrs. Mays:

  Regarding the incident of December 23, 2008 …

  Derek watched me as I read on. The letter took a lot of words to get to the point. In short: The other divers involved in Dad’s accident had all settled their suits against Bernaco. Dad’s case was the only one still open.

  “Well, none of them died,” Derek snorted. He started pacing, working his hands through his hair in frustration. “They’re all alive.”

  I read on:

  New evidence in the matter has come to light. Bernaco Oil has offered convincing evidence that it was the faulty manufacture of a fitting mechanism on the pipe that caused the unfortunate rupture that occurred …

  Derek stopped pacing. “They’re saying that? What I think they’re saying?”

  I nodded, not believing it myself. “They’re saying some little part broke, that’s all. They’re saying they’re not responsible.”

  “Little.” Derek snorted. “Little! It killed him.”

  For the reasonable loss of wages represented by the untimely death of Mr. Mays, the defendant offers a settlement of $52,544. While of course the decision to accept or reject the offer rests with you and your family, it is our strong and considered recommendation …

  When I finished reading, Derek took the letter from me and crumpled it into a ball. He threw it across the room, then pulled open the door and stalked into the front yard, still barefoot. I watched him pace there for a moment, and then he just walked off into the dark, down the street.

  “Some boys throw tantrums,” Mama had once said. “D’s a walker.”

  When he reappeared, he rested his face on the screen door mesh. “Fifty thousand dollars,” he said wearily. “Somehow it’s both a lot of money and none at all.”

  “They can’t just do that.”

  “They did.”

  “So—what, we just accept their claim? Just roll over?”

  “We fight it, it’ll cost us money we don’t have,” Derek said. “Even if we won, we’d lose.”

  I felt helpless. “It isn’t fair.”

  “World doesn’t owe us fair.”

  Fifty thousand dollars. That was about ten grand for every year Dad had been gone. If I woke up the girls and said, Hey, you can have ten thousand dollars, or Dad could have been at your kindergarten graduation, they wouldn’t have had to think about it. The lawyers, the oil company—they didn’t care if fifty thousand dollars was fair. They knew people like us didn’t have a choice. Money was money.

  “Dad wouldn’t have just given up,” I said.

  “Dad’s not here. That’s not an option.” He slumped against the door, defeated. “People like us don’t get options, Z.”

  In the morning, he was gone before I woke. I found a note on the table:

  Meeting attorney today. You think about what I said. Quit that job, focus on school. —D.

  Derek didn’t often leave notes. Same reason he asked me to read things: He’d struggled with words his whole life. Had a harder time reading than the other kids; writing was almost as difficult. He’d never been diagnosed, but more than one teacher had suggested to Mama and Dad that he was dyslexic. But Derek just figured his shit out. It was what Vanessa’s counselor, Mrs. Rhyzkov, had meant when she called him such a determined student. He graduated a favorite of his teachers and was accepted into Cal Poly.

  So the note meant two things: He felt strongly enough about the message to write it down, which was a nontrivial effort for him; and he wanted me to follow his lead, to work hard. At school—not at any job. He wanted me to finish what he’d started.

  In homeroom on Monday, Bryn Bell smiled as I hefted my backpack onto the desk. Inside the cover of my sketchbook was Vanessa’s envelope.

  Enjoy your senior year, my brother had said.

  All those empty boxes on the application form. I didn’t even know if I could fill them all in. I felt Bryn watching me as I rummaged for a pen.

  “Here.” She held out a blue ballpoint.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Twenty minutes left in homeroom.

  I could do a lot of writing in twenty minutes.

  18

  Vanessa

  “I had no idea you were into the occult.”

  I looked up from The Demon-Haunted World to see Zach standing at the top of the staircase. The library’s loft was the school’s best-kept secret. I usually had it entirely to myself. But of course he would know about it. I forgot, sometimes, that I’d been here just a couple of months. Zach’s been here for years.

  I closed the book. “It’s not about the occult. How’d you know I was up here?”

  He leaned forward and inspected the cover. “Ah. That Sagan guy again. It sounds like it’s about the—”

  “It’s not. It’s about science teaching people to put aside myths.” I put the book down. “I’ve read it, like, four times.”

  “You read books that many times?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I guess if I had time,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe I’d rather read something new. There are so many books.”

  “When I was a kid, I made Mom read Where the Wild Things Are so often I think she wanted to run away like Max.”

  “I used to draw them,” he said. “The wild things. I never quite mastered the teeth gnashing, though. Nobody does teeth gnashing like Sendak.”

  “You should read this.” I held the book out to him. “You’d probably be into it.”

  He reached into his backpack and sheepishly pulled out The Varieties of Scientific Experience. “I’m only, like, two pages in.”

  “I’m happy to be a positive influence,” I said. “Next thing I know you’ll be naming the stars yourself.”

  “Booger. Booger the star.”

  “You’re joking. But someday someone’s going to do that—or worse—and we’re going to have to live with it.”

  He sat cross-legged beside me and reached back into his bag. “So…” His hand came out again, this time holding the Fleck application I’d given him. “I could use some help with this thing.”

  “Moi?” I asked, hand to my chest. But I took the application and looked over what he’d filled in so far. It was all the basics: name, address, Social Security number. “You have really nice handwriting.”

  “I’ve been writing words since I was a kid,” he deadpanned. “You don’t have to help. I’m just saying.”

  The following pages of the application were blank, except for the first section, Extracurricular Activities. He’d started writing something there, then stopped almost as quickly.

  “Maybe we start here,” I said, ignoring what he’d just said. “What are your extracurriculars? You know. Chess club or computer club or debate or whatever.”

  He chewed his lip. “I don’t have any.”

  “You don’t do anything after school?”

  “I, uh—I work.”

  “Right,” I said. “I don’t know if that counts, though.”

  “That’s—that’s all I’ve got,” he said. For such a tall guy, I thought, I’d certainly made him seem very small very quickly. His face turned crimson, and he reached for the application. “This was stupid.”

  “No, no,” I said. “Hey. It’s not stupid. Okay? We’ll come back to this part.” I held the application tightly and scanned down the page. “Next thing it wants is … okay. ‘Honors, awards, or distinctions.’”

  He hesitated. “I won first prize in a county art thing once.”

  “That’s perfect,” I exclaimed. Whoa, Vanessa. Dial it back. “When was that?”

  “Seventh grade? I think.”
>
  Shit. Gently, I said, “I think they, uh, probably mean high school things.”

  His shoulders slumped. “Of course. Right.”

  “Honor roll counts, anything like that,” I prompted. “Citizenship, attendance, all those nitpicky little things.”

  He reached for the paper again. “I’m wasting your time.”

  “Zach, it’s fine,” I said. “Really. I want to help. It’s easy stuff—it isn’t a big deal.”

  “Forget it.”

  He grasped the corner of the paper and wouldn’t let go, and I pulled too hard, and just like that, I’d ripped the application in half.

  “No!” I squeaked. “Ah, shit. Shit. Zach, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  His expression changed, and I recognized it: He’d had the same look on his face at the football game, when our player sprinted the whole length of the field only to eat it just short of the goal line.

  “It’s okay. We can do it online.”

  “I don’t have internet,” he mumbled, scrambling to his feet.

  “There are computers right here. Downstairs.” But he had adopted the posture of a scared animal, looking for a way out. “Zach, I’ll just print a new one—”

  “I’m sorry I wasted your time,” he said. He zipped his bag shut, barely listening to me, and before I could get to my feet, he was on the stairs. I went to the railing and looked down. He jogged across the first floor, toward the library doors.

  “Zach, come on,” I called after him, prompting a sharp stare from the librarian. But he was gone. Just like that.

  * * *

  “Nothing?”

  Cece held up empty palms. We were in A wing, near Zach’s locker.

  “Maybe he ditched,” she said.

  I’d printed a new application from the Fleck website. Zach’s torn copy was in my bag. “God, I feel awful.”

  “For what? You were trying to help.”

  “It’s like—we go to the same school, but I must seem like I’m from Io.”

  “Mars,” Cece said. “Most people would say Mars.”

  “Io’s way weirder,” I said distractedly. “Cece. What do I do?”