Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  But the universe gave me this wake-up call and I didn’t ignore it. I didn’t. Five months clean.

  Until today. Because a drink counts. Which means I’ll be back to day one, if I get to day one, and day one fucking sucks.

  They say you’re clean, but then why do I still feel so dirty all the time? There is no clean. Not for girls like me.

  “Where’ve you gone, Nah?” Micah murmurs. He runs a finger between my eyes, to the thinking-too-hard wrinkles between them.

  “Nowhere,” I say.

  He smiles. He doesn’t understand what nowhere means to me.

  “I miss you.” He rubs the tip of my nose with his. “I miss my girl. I know it’s been hard. That you’ve been sad. I want us to be okay. Me being here, in college—this isn’t going to change anything. I promise.”

  And this is why love is so confusing: because now he’s my sweet surfer boy who makes my heart beat a little fast again.

  “I love you,” I whisper.

  “I love you more than the best wave in the ocean.”

  I reach for the bottle next to his alarm clock and gulp down more fire. I notice the time, written in big red numbers that glow in the dark of the room: 8:06 p.m. I am suspended in this minute, just for a moment—drunk girl’s prerogative—and I see them, I see my parents. I conjure them.

  It is morning in Malaysia, and the sun is beating down, and Mom’s wearing that wide-brimmed hat Mae and I got for her, the one with the red bow that matches her swimsuit.

  Wow, Mom says, way out there on her island in Malaysia. The current’s strong today. Look at how the water is pulling back into the ocean.

  Dad lifts up his phone and takes a picture to show to his oceanographer friend. Then he points.

  Look at the water breaking, way out there. He takes another picture. It is a wave and it is coming.

  Micah whispers, I remembered a condom this time.

  * * *

  “Holy shit. Wake up, Nah. Baby, wake up.”

  Micah is shaking me and something has died in my mouth and my head is full of shards of glass. Fuck. Why do I do this to myself?

  “The universe is telling you something, Nah,” Mom is saying when we walk out of the clinic. I ask her what the hell the universe could possibly be telling me other than to practice safe fucking and she doesn’t even blink at my use of the word fucking. She just shrugs and says, “She speaks through the gut.” But I can’t think about my gut because it’s empty now and all I want to do is fill it with pills, real pills, and those bitches inside only gave me Tylenol. And I don’t ask Mom what she means by speak. What does that mean when you can’t hear the universe—or when it doesn’t speak to you at all?

  When we get home, Mom grabs a bundle of sage and sits me down in front of her altar. On it is a picture of Amma, this lady famous for hugging who Mom says taught her how to love, and also a picture of Yoko, looking kick-ass in a bowler hat and shades. “Okay,” Mom says, lighting the sage, “I’m gonna smudge the shit out of you.”

  I have promised I will do better. No more almost-failing my classes, no more being stoned and pregnant and generally useless. I told Mom I was doing better. I was. Technically, I was. I told her to go on this trip. I wanted her off my back. And how was I to know I was going to drink half a bottle of vodka last night? I didn’t mean it, didn’t plan it.

  Fuck. Fuck me and fuck my life and I fucking hate myself so much.

  Hungover as a mother. But not a mother. Because who would want me, who would want to be a copy of this?

  You’d think getting knocked up and almost failing the eleventh grade would be rock bottom enough for any girl. Ha.

  “Hannah,” Micah says, his hand on my arm.

  “Go to class,” I mumble, throwing his pillow over my head. “You can take me home after.”

  It’s too late to go back to Venice and get to school on time. Ditching school on a Friday is what any self-respecting senior would do.

  His phone rings. “Mae? Sorry—sorry. I just saw your text. Fuck. I’m freaking out. I just woke up. My phone was on silent, so I missed all your—No. She’s asleep.” Micah’s voice veers in my direction. “Nah. Seriously, wake up. Please.”

  I turn over. “Just tell her I’m ditching. Christ, she has to stop micromanaging my life. Only one of us is going to be an astronaut someday, and it isn’t me. The world will be fine if I cut a few more classes.”

  I wonder what it must be like for Mae, to know that she matters, that she will maybe change the world. Dad is delighted by her. Mom is in awe of her. It’s like the universe had to even out her being adopted. I might have my parents’ genes, but she’s the best of them.

  I’m so fucking basic.

  “I’m looking now,” he says to Mae. “CNN.”

  The room fills with the sound of people screaming. I bolt up. Micah’s at his desk, staring at his laptop.

  “What is that?” I’m getting out of bed. “What?”

  He turns toward me. Tries to say words, but all that comes out is a croak. Like when I said, Hey, I have to tell you something, and held up that stick with the two lines.

  And I know, I think. I don’t know what, but it’s like I know everything in my life is turning to utter shit. Again.

  “Was there a terrorist attack?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. What scares me isn’t the fear on his face. It’s the confusion. Like the tables have been turned. Like whatever is on CNN is actually personal, like it’s going to be more than just some randomness you talk about, not a school shooting across the country or a famine on the other side of the world.

  I hold out my hand and he gives me his phone.

  “It’s me,” I say.

  I hear words and Mae has the kind of voice doctors on TV use when they come into the hospital waiting room with really bad fucking news. But I don’t know what she’s saying because I’m looking at Micah’s screen. And I see it.

  I see the wave.

  3

  Mae

  ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

  Earth Date: 30 August

  Earth Time (PST): 09:52

  A tsunami can travel at 500 miles per hour, as fast as a commercial jet.

  The tallest tsunami ever recorded was in Alaska. It was 100 feet.

  Rossby Waves, which aren’t tsunamis, just large-scale ocean waves, take roughly 221 days to cross an ocean. A tsunami? One day. Sometimes less than one day.

  Tsunamis rush the shore at the speed of a major league pitcher’s fastball. Faster, even.

  They’re caused by underwater earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or other explosions under the ocean’s surface, movement in glaciers—even meteorites crashing down from space.

  Many survivors report that a tsunami sounds like a freight train and that the water is gray-brown because it’s churning up the ocean floor.

  The water is full of all sorts of things:

  Metal

  Pieces of buildings

  Cars

  Shards of glass

  Toys

  Palm trees

  Beach umbrellas

  Gold watches

  Cell phones

  Bathing suit tops

  My parents

  It takes eight to ten minutes to drown in seawater. Fresh water is two to three minutes. You die from cardiac arrest. I didn’t know that. I thought it was your lungs filling with water, but it’s your heart that gives out. That gives up.

  For the past seventeen minutes and thirty-two seconds, I have been on a mental EVA—Extravehicular Activity, more commonly referred to by laypersons as a space walk.

  It is ten years in the future, and I am on the International Space Station, scrunched into a tiny window seat.

  There’s a bright blue line on the horizon, mixing with the emerald smoky green of the aurora that swirls over Earth’s surface like a potion in a cauldron—another sunrise, one of the sixteen I get to see up here every day on the ISS. Since we orbit Earth every ninety-two minutes, that means sixteen sunrises a
nd sixteen sunsets. How’s that for a life?

  We race toward it, toward the light, and neon cerulean turns to blinding gold as the sun rises over the east, spilling across the beaches of Malaysia right below us.

  Up here, I can just make out the rocky coastline of the islands, edged by white sand, green water giving way to the darkest blue of the ocean. A raft of clouds floats by, covering my view, and then we’re speeding past those beaches, heading toward our next sunset.

  Mad Matter Magazine Vol. 4, No. 12

  Today, we’re sitting down with theoretical physicist Dr. Greg Winters to talk dark matter, the nature of the universe, and time travel.

  Mad Matter: Dr. Winters, you are one of the world’s leading physicists, doing groundbreaking research on the very nature of the universe. NASA calls you when they’re stumped. People say there might be a Nobel Prize sitting in your office someday. Yet you’ve taken a sabbatical. Why?

  Dr. Winters: My research on dark matter and dark energy—

  Mad Matter: For our readers, I’ll just interject here: This is the stuff that makes up ninety-five percent of the universe, but we have no idea what it is.

  Dr. Winters: Correct. My work in this field has inadvertently created a, shall we say, event horizon of sorts in my life—not to get all heavy on you with general relativity and spacetime.

  Mad Matter: [Laughs] Give us your best explanation of what an event horizon is.

  Dr. Winters: An event horizon is the point of no return. It’s a terrain in spacetime that’s created when the gravitational pull of a massive object is so great that escaping it is impossible. Imagine a huge magnet, pointed at you, and you’re covered in metal. There’s no avoiding its pull. When that massive object is coming your way, it’s creating that point of no return. You can’t escape the object. You have to face it.

  Event horizons are mostly discussed in relation to black holes, but they’re a great metaphor for life, too.

  Mad Matter: How so?

  Dr. Winters: Well, all of us, at one time or another, are going to have something happen that creates an event horizon—a point of no return. The first thing is to accept that we can’t escape it, and so we need to face it head-on. Next, we need to look for the potential this event horizon presents us with.

  Mad Matter: What is the potential of an event horizon?

  Dr. Winters: Theoretically, if you could actually make it across the event horizon, you could see the entire history of the universe playing out before you. You see Napoleon on his horse and your ancestors in the fields and the suffragettes marching in the streets of New York City, and you see your children sleeping in bed in the other room and you see the cancer diagnosis you will get five years from now. You see every bit of it. All of time is happening at the same moment all around you.

  Now, here on Earth, we can’t get ourselves to actual event horizons that let us see the future and thus help us make better choices in the present. We can’t time travel. Yet.

  Mad Matter: So how does it help us—knowing event horizons are out there, and that there’s potential to see all of time playing out at once?

  Dr. Winters: For me, it makes life on Earth a little more bearable: There’s comfort in knowing that whatever is going to happen is already happening right now. In spacetime. It takes the pressure off. The deaths and births and screwups and victories—it’s already playing out. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.

  4

  Mae

  ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

  Earth Date: 30 August

  Earth Time (PST): 11:30

  Anything can happen in space.

  It’s an environment in which human life is impossible. But if you’re an astronaut, you’re human. WHICH MEANS YOU’RE DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE. You’re floating around in a tin can with a finite amount of oxygen, in a very vulnerable body, hoping that the math is right because it’s the only thing that’s going to keep you alive.

  Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. There are things you can control, like how well trained you are, the ability to stay calm under pressure—literal and figurative—and your intelligence. And if you’ve got a good crew, like the kind that would go into Mordor with you, and they are well trained and intelligent, then you exponentially increase your chances of survival.

  The fact that we can go to space and survive there is proof positive that we can do impossible things. That’s what my dad is always saying—We can do impossible things.

  When I was six, I alerted my father to the fact that maybe there are certain conditions in society that make it impossible for female members of our species to do impossible things. Such as, women make up less than eleven percent of humans sent into space. I informed my father that the probability of me wearing a NASA space suit wasn’t great. His answer was to sit me down to watch an interview with astronaut Peggy Whitson, who would go on to become the commander of the International Space Station and would break records for time spent in space: 665 DAYS, the most of any American woman. “We can do impossible things,” he said. Then we went to the Griffith Observatory to look at stars.

  And this year? Fifty percent of NASA’s astronaut candidates are women. FIFTY PERCENT!

  Someday I’m going to be up there. I’m going to be on the International Space Station and I’m going to do space walks and listen to “Starman” while watching my sixteenth sunrise of the day and I’m going to call my dad from space and it is going to be SPECTACULAR.

  That phone call is going to happen because my father is alive. We are going to find him and he’ll come up with a great metaphor about this wave. Just another opportunity to visit the event horizon, he’ll say. And Mom will announce she’s going to make soup and we’ll help her and it will be so good, the best soup anyone has ever eaten, and maybe we’ll call it Miracle Soup, even though only half our family believes in miracles. I’m not in that demographic, but maybe I could be, if they came home.

  I started training to be an astronaut when I was six years old, but I think I actually began preparing when I was born. I had to learn, from day one, to adapt to hostile environments that threatened my existence.

  Not being picked up when you cry is a hostile environment.

  Having a social worker come into your home and realize your diaper hasn’t been changed in an entire day is a hostile environment.

  By the time I was three, when my parents adopted me after my biological mother officially chose drugs over me, I’d been in seven foster homes.

  The thing about being an astronaut is that you have to spend your whole life training. From the second you decide you want to be in that big white suit someday, to the moment you’re strapped in, listening to that ten, nine, eight, seven, six—you never stop getting ready for the mission.

  Your whole life is a sim.

  Practicing for disaster. For the worst-case scenario. For Houston, we have a problem.

  Expecting the unexpected.

  The worst happens and you work the problem. Right away. That’s what you do. You do not cry or have a panic attack or pray or get angry at the engineers on Earth who did incorrect calculations or blame it on the Russians or have a deep-space existential crisis. No. You work the problem.

  Work the problem is NASA protocol when there’s bad news or flashing red lights or space debris in your trajectory: Work the problem.

  My favorite scene in Apollo 13 is when the engineers all get in a room and one of them holds up a cylindrical carbon dioxide filter and says, “We need to fit this”—and then he holds up a square one—“into this”—and then he points to a bunch of junk he’s thrown on the table—“using this.” The Apollo crew is up there breathing in CO2, dying, in a shuttle that might not have enough juice to make it back to Earth. These engineers on the ground have to figure out how to turn what those astronauts have on the shuttle into the ultimate breathing hack. In outer space. And they do it. They save the astronauts. That’s working the problem.

  Astronauts spend hours in simulators, dying eve
ry single day so that they can stay alive on the day that counts.

  A good astronaut knows that anything—rejection, failure, death—can be a sim. Everything in your life is preparation for the mission.

  I start working the problem before Hannah gets to the house, which means I have been on hold with the Red Cross or the State Department for the past twelve hours. From the time Gram called last night, I had to alternate between calling my sister’s boyfriend and trying to ascertain whether my parents have survived a wave that has destroyed a good portion of the Malaysian coast.

  My vitals are good—coffee and math have assisted in this—but Hannah’s are not. This is apparent as soon as I see her step out of Micah’s Jeep. I suspect she cried all the way down the freeway.

  There is a part of me—irrational, I understand—that is surprised to see her. Somehow, in calling and not hearing from her and in calling Dad’s and Mom’s cells and not hearing from them, I started to think that Hannah had been caught in the wave, too. That, somewhere in Malaysia, my sister was floating facedown.

  And so, when her feet hit the driveway, I run. Her mouth opens in an O, an expanding galaxy, because I am not given to displays of emotion and have never run toward her, just beside her, but I can’t help it when I throw my body against hers, which is much taller and softer than mine.

  “You’re alive.”

  I don’t know why I say this, because of course she is. I attribute this cognitive malfunction to a severe lack of sleep.

  Nah cries harder, her whole body sagging against me, as though we are doing a trust exercise for AP Psych. I shift my weight as we start to fall, keeping us upright because she can trust me. I am working the problem. I will find them.