The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

by Patrick Somerville

  He looks up.

  “Come here.”

  He does. When he sees the X, he says, “No riddle, I guess.”

  He goes to his pack, up near the open door, and returns with his small spade. He approaches the X, drops to his knees, and begins to dig.

  Eliza steps back and watches him work. Both are silent—the only sound is the soft sand parting way as the spade easily cuts downward. And then: the sharp clank of metal on metal.

  Soon, Tom has unearthed the top of a sturdy-looking chest. He begins to dig around the sides. Eliza drops to her knees now, too, and instead of going to retrieve her own shovel, she uses her hands to push away the remaining mounds of cool, wet sand.

  After a few more minutes of digging, enough sand has been moved.

  Tom reaches forward, unlatches the chest’s heavy metal clips.

  There’s an engraving. Just these lines:

  WITH LIPS UNBRIGHTENED, r WREATHLESS BROW, I STROLL:

  AND WOULD YOU LEARN THE SPELLS THAT DROWSE MY SOUL?

  WORK WITHOUT HOPE DRAWS NECTAR IN A SIEVE,

  AND HOPE WITHOUT AN OBJECT CANNOT LIVE.

  “Well,” Tom says. “Don’t fucking understand that.”

  Eliza, looking down, says, “I think it’s Coleridge.”

  “How nice,” Tom says.

  He lifts the lid.

  And right there is The Machine of Understanding Other People:

  It’s night. Hours later. Eliza is on the couch, paging through a copy of Domino, vaguely aware of Tom at work in the kitchenette, cooking dinner. The cave has filled with the smell of garlic. It is perhaps the eighth or ninth excuse he has invented to avoid acknowledging the situation, and the thing they’ve just dug up.

  A part of Eliza can’t help but understand Tom’s hesitation at tangling with his inheritance. The look of it alone is somewhat intimidating. Seen from the top, Eliza immediately thought of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the old-timey helmets divers used to wear. Bubble-like, a little gladiatorial, steel, glass window at the front the size of an obscenely large salad bowl, hole at the top, perhaps for an air-tube. Or something.

  But there’s more. Dappled across the curved top and sides of the helmet, there are oddly shaped, apparently articulated antennae and sensors of some kind. They are different three-dimensional shapes—mainly spheres—held in place by thin stalks of steel. And on other stalks at the front, thinner stalks hold delicate-looking lenses, each with its own jointed arm, as though they can be twisted and stacked in different orders and orientations, yielding different optical results.

  It is a helmet.

  It is a large, greenish, absurd, ungainly helmet.

  It does not seem safe.

  “Did you say you wanted salad?” Tom asks, still in the kitchenette.

  “I didn’t say.”

  “That means you get salad.”

  Eliza again looks over at the hole near the ping-pong table. They have not yet touched the device. After a few moments of looking down at it, Tom said, “Let’s just leave that right there for a while.” Eliza did reach out gingerly to touch it. She wanted to feel what it might feel like, feel the tiny lenses. Before she could, though, Tom grabbed her wrist and said, “Don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, “it’s so dumb.”

  It’s his inheritance, she supposes. If he doesn’t want to take it out, he doesn’t have to take it out.

  “We have arugula!” Tom sings, coming down toward the couches, two small (rock) bowls in his hands. “Herman likes to keep his pad stocked, apparently. Even being dead and all.” He sets the salad down in front of her. “Pepper?” he asks.

  “Tom.”

  He’s standing near, holding the rock pepper shaker, smiling.

  “?”

  “I think,” she says, “you should try it.”

  “The pepper? I already did. It’s good.”

  “No.”

  “What?” Tom says. “That thing?” He straightens up and looks over toward the hole. “Why?”

  “Well,” she says. “Perhaps you might find out if it…does anything. Aren’t you curious?”

  Tom sets the pepper shaker down on the table and goes over to his own salad. He finds a cherry tomato on the top, pops it into his mouth, chews.

  “Here’s the thing,” he says, but then says nothing else.

  “Are you afraid of it?”

  “Yes,” Tom says immediately.

  “Why?”

  “Does it not look like something a French king might put onto the head of some sad little French prince for, like, a decade? Or does it not, actually, I don’t know, look like something that might, say, implode my skull when I put it on? Have you seen those fucking Saw movies? You know?”

  “I think you’d have to admit,” she says, “that everything we’ve been up to lately is an act of faith. You came here, didn’t you? You’re sitting in your Great Uncle Herman’s cave home, aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” Tom says. “This is just the first time I’ve been asked to wear a helmet. Call it a new level of faith, then. Say there are rings of faith. Levels. I don’t want to jump another one.”

  “Do you know what I think?”

  “That you getting the money is a much, much, much better inheritance?”

  “I think you’re afraid.”

  “I just admitted that,” he says. “Yes. Not hiding it. You’re right.”

  “Not like that,” she says. “I think you’re afraid it might actually work.”

  “That thing,” he says, pointing with his fork, “doesn’t do shit. I promise you.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Maybe it’s the accumulated pressure of this last week, the slow and steady dissolution of her belief in all that’s normal, consistent, and predictable about the world. The sun will always rise the next day, cause-and-effect, Hume and all of that. But of course that’s not quite true, is it? Not necessarily, at least? As she looks at the hole, Eliza feels it come over her, just as the musty air of this place had come over them only hours before: our sense of what’s real, our sense of what’s true, our sense of what’s possible, our sense of the world, our sense of being here, on Earth, now, and living this life, which we have not asked for, having this body, having this heart… it’s all an act of faith, anyway. It’s a miracle of the highest order that we are not presented, day after day, with miracles. Or that we’re all here in the first place. It’s all the same. And she is therefore certain that the helmet will work. She knows it—she has felt it for the whole day, during the whole oddly beautiful walk with this inexplicable man. It’s as though because they are here, within this particular story, the helmet will have to work.

  “I’ll try it, then.” She stands. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Tom says. “What will I do with your body?”

  “Too bad, Tom.”

  With that, Eliza crosses the room and goes to the hole, thinking of her grandmother, Beatrice, wondering at the specifics of the logic behind such things. She passes the ping-pong table; Tom has stayed put.

  “Okay,” she says, looking down at the helmet.

  Tom is standing. “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  She squats, reaches down. If she is to be the type of person who will head up an organization designed to save the dying world—for real—it’s not as though she can be afraid of such things. The metal is cool and feels cleaner than she expected it to feel. For some reason, she expected there to be something slimy about it. But the greenish hue is apparently a quality of the metal itself.

  When she pulls upward, gripping the helmet, she nearly rolls backward, ass-over-tea-kettle. It feels light enough to be made of plastic.

  “It’s so light!” she says.

  Standing up straight, holding it at her waist, she looks at Tom, who’s pointing.

  “There’s something dangling from it.”

  She looks down. Tom’s right. A simple stic
k, the size of a conductor’s wand, is indeed dangling from the helmet, attached by a cord no thicker than a speaker-wire.

  Eliza tucks the helmet under her right arm and holds the lower rim tightly. Using her left hand, she dips and plucks the wand from the air.

  “What do you suppose this is?” she says, looking at it.

  “You’re asking me?’

  She squints at the inscrutable little stick.

  “If that thing kills you, I’m taking the money,” Tom says. “And I am not using it to save the world. I’m using it on yachts.”

  “Just watch me, please,” she says. “Make sure I’m all right.”

  “Really,” he says, and she can see that he’s not joking. “You don’t need to put it on. I get your point.”

  “What’s my point?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Something…fruity and liberal.”

  “I’m putting it on.”

  And she puts it on.

  At first: just darkness, a hint of her own claustrophobia as her mind realizes she’s lost her peripheral vision. Then she can hear the high-pitched whine of small motors. She sees a glint of movement above her brow.

  “What’s happening?” she asks.

  Her voice is lost and tinny, as though she’s speaking from the bottom of a well. Tom has come over and is standing right in front of her. Her voice bounces off the glass bubble and washes back over her, but she sees that he can hear her.

  “The things,” he says, pointing above your head. His voice is small and distant to her ears, even though he’s right there. “The little gizmos are all kinda…kinda moving around. It’s like your head’s in the middle of a…a watch.” He flicks his eyes down to her eyes. “Is anything happening? Do you feel anything?”

  “No.”

  She remembers, then, what she’s holding in her left hand. She tilts her head to look down at the little stick, then looks back at Tom.

  “Maybe this?”

  She points the thing at Tom’s face.

  Her brain explodes.

  Well. Such is the initial feeling, such is how it seems to Eliza as the leading edge of Tom’s consciousness rolls into her own, as though his is a wave and hers is a wave and they have merged and amplified one another in the process. She first feels the muted inebriation Tom must right now be feeling, even though you wouldn’t quite know it, looking at him. And although drunkenness isn’t one of her regular states, at least it makes sense. What comes next does not make much sense.

  It’s his mood. It’s his mood right now, she can feel it, and it’s not one she’s ever quite known. There’s an arrogance and a fear together. Below that, a sadness, a kind of desperation, hidden. Not the sadness of what it’s like to lose one’s parents, her only real barometer of extreme emotion. Eliza glimpses—no, feels—that Tom’s mother and father are alive and well. One is in Arizona. One in the Florida Keys. It’s not that. It’s a sadness much closer to disappointment in oneself. It takes multiple decades of failure. It’s a foreign feeling and terrifying to Eliza; she feels, too, how the booze mutes it.

  New layers, now, as though she’s peeling back onionskins. She is deeper again. She has roved to a place of being where she can see herself as she is in Tom’s mind. She feels tremendous lust—in an instant, one hundred images of her own body pass through her mind, a nonlinear catalogue of her lips, her eyes, her breasts, and (she was right, she knew it, even though she hasn’t sensed Tom hitting on her at all) her ass during the second half of the hike. Further back, down into other corridors, are things Tom has imagined about her, she is sure. It is her but it’s not what she’s done. All in this short time! She does not go further down those corridors. She doesn’t want to see.

  Because there’s far more to see, anyway. She tumbles down a shoot and finds herself swept up in Tom’s sense of beautiful things. First she sees the landscape of the day’s hike, just as she saw it, but time no longer being a straight line, at least not from the inside of someone, she knows that Tom used to love math and used to be good at it. Now it’s simply a tool he uses to calculate tips, but there, back in his school days, in high school: Tom is at work on some quiz, and the meaning of the problem snaps into sharp relief on the paper, and along with it, a deeper and abstract sense for the concept haunting the subtext of the problem. This place is peaceful. If she stayed here longer she might see how Tom is amazed that math even works, that numbers map properly atop our universe, how that seems to be a miracle, and it’s like her thoughts on miracles from right before she put the helmet on her head. They’re the same in that way.

  Near beauty is a place where Tom keeps his knowledge of love. It may as well be a strip mine in his brain, not the heart at all. She sees two wives. A first wife, a second wife. He sees the second wife—Sherry—and feels the weight and power of fifteen years together. There’s a vastness to it. She has never come close to something like this; she has only ever attended the kindergarten of romantic love, she has only ever had two or three real boyfriends. Here is a destitute man who has felt more than she has felt. He is not shallow—and in fact, the whole concept, now, here, is ludicrous, because there is no such thing as shallowness if you consider the unbearable, unfathomable depth of any one single—

  She’s on the ground.

  Flash.

  She’s lying on the ground, hyperventilating.

  Tom is yelling

  “—holding up? Eliza! Goddammit, you’re looking at me but I can’t—tell me if you’re awake. Can you hear this?”

  “No,” she says.

  Tom looks relieved when he hears her voice. “Are you looking at me?” He waves his hand in front of her eyes. “Are you in there?”

  “No,” she says again. But she is. She’s on the ground, looking up at him. She takes a deep breath through her nose, then sees the helmet behind Tom and to the right. “Yes,” she says. “I mean yes. What happened?”

  She sits up.

  “I tore it off you,” he says. “You looked like you were having a seizure in there.”

  She looks at the helmet, then looks into Tom’s eyes.

  “I know,” she says. “Thank you.”

  After this experience, Eliza has learned a number of things about The Machine of Understanding Other People. Beyond the obvious—it works—she’s discovered that: 1) to probe a mind makes you very thirsty, and 2) to probe a mind makes the thought of talking—any kind of talking, at any length, at any volume, regarding any subject—completely unbearable. For the thirst, she simply drinks water for the rest of the night, what feels like gallons and gallons. Still, she can’t quite quench it.

  Before they go to bed, the problem with talking is a little trickier, especially because Tom immediately takes to quizzing her about the helmet. It’s not as though she doesn’t want to talk, to tell Tom about it, to explain to him the strange details of what it felt like to be her being him. It’s only that the thought of communicating—finding the ideas and building the words atop them and uttering the sounds—and watching his reaction and listening to his responses and thinking about them and developing responses in return—feels impossible. It’s as though she would have to consciously perform each step, one by one, instead of her mind simply doing it for her, as it usually does.

  She has an empathy hangover.

  “Is there a reason,” Tom says, about an hour later, “you’re not talking?”

  She shakes her head no.

  “You’re just resting.”

  She nods.

  He looks dubiously at the helmet, then goes to make another drink.

  She’s staring at the helmet, too, going over in her head what she saw in Tom’s head, when he comes back to the couches and sets a drink down on the table for her, too.

  “Seems appropriate,” he says.

  She agrees. She takes the glass and drinks. It’s scotch on the rocks, and it helps.

  “I guess I’ll just be up in the bedroom area,” he says, pointing. “Or, um. Why don’t you, actually? Why don’
t you take the bed? You look tired, I’m beat…We can talk about that—well, that thing—” he nods at the helmet—“in the morning.”

  They will never talk about it.

  She doesn’t dream.

  She doesn’t sleep well, either, despite the intense thread-count of Uncle Herman’s sheets. More than anything, she feels sad. Sad for Tom. Sad for larger things.

  She drifts off, then wakes. Drifts and wakes.

  Once she wakes and the cave is pitch-black. She hears a scraping sound, then nothing.

  She falls asleep again.

  And Eliza will wonder, in the coming weeks and months, if she should perhaps have tried harder, either that night or the next morning, to explain to Tom what she saw when she pointed the stick at him. Could he even see himself? Perhaps not. Perhaps now no one on Earth knew him better, not even himself. Because she felt much better when she woke early the next morning, she felt much more able to communicate, she might have made a stronger effort. And would that have mattered? I see—I see you, Tom, she might have said. People need that. She rolled to the side and saw Tom asleep on the couch, remembered about the helmet. But say he woke up and they talked. What more could she have told him, if he pressed for details? That she knew how terrible it was to be him? That she had felt what it was to be his particular kind of frightened narcissist, and that she had never in her life imagined one might be so trapped within one mind? To be Tom was to be very different, no doubt: he was a man, of course, although Eliza was not so sure the deep differences between the two of them fundamentally came down to gender. To be Tom was to be a kind of sourness. To be so steeped in the verified disappointments of the world was to believe something not disappointing was almost not possible, not imaginable, and that, she knew—although she could not quite put words to it, not yet—went strongly against what it was to be Eliza.

  But then again, wasn’t it to be experienced? Here was a man who had seen more, done more, felt more, and lived more? She was young. She was sheltered—she’d done it to herself. She had few friends, she had little beyond work and books. So maybe there was something to Tom’s pessimism that needed to be cherished, too? Could such negativity be cherished? Wasn’t there a place for the deep skepticism of a cynic? For the realpolitik of the man who had seen things, seen real pain, was unable to deny its existence just for the sake of whimsy? Pangea was foolish in the light of most minds. But his way—it certainly was not wisdom. She hoped. More like: to be Tom was to be smugly satisfied with hopelessness. As though the only true, adult, reasonable point of view was to be hopeless? And that was not acceptable. No matter her age, no matter what she had or had not seen.