“The ISS is only two hundred twenty miles above Earth,” I say. “So, actually, you know, depending on where I am in its orbit and where you are … it might be closer than if we lived in different states. I mean, technically.”
She grins. “I love you, weirdo.”
I wrap my arms around my sister, crush her against me. “I love you, too. To infinity and beyond.”
Part 3
Little Universes
39
Mae
ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit
Earth Date: 16 April
Earth Time (EST): 13:24
I AM GOING TO ANNAPOLIS.
I have carried my acceptance letter with me for the past day, and I’ve pulled it out so many times to reread it that the paper has become fuzzy almost.
I am going to Annapolis.
I am going to Annapolis, and I can’t tell my dad.
I am going to become a fighter pilot, and then a test pilot, and then an astronaut. I am going to watch the sun rise and set over Earth sixteen times a day.
And I can’t tell my dad.
The picnic was Nah’s idea. She said one of Jo’s rules is that you have to celebrate everything and that getting into my dream school constitutes as something and everything.
It’s a warm April day, perfect for lying around on Boston Common and eating Aunt Nora’s red velvet cupcakes.
I begged Nah not to play matchmaker and invite Ben. I made her swear on Yoko Ono’s life. And then I made Nate swear on SpaceX’s budget.
So Ben won’t be there.
Which is good. I think my experiment is working. It hurts now, yes. A lot, to be honest. Four months without Ben has been very extremely difficult. But I know that once I leave, once I go to Annapolis, this feeling will fade. I am an adolescent. As my hormones calibrate, these intense sensations will subside. It doesn’t make sense to be together when I’m just going to get on a plane in June. Long-distance relationships are highly inefficient, and, more important, I am in training to be a self-sufficient astronaut. I can’t be worrying about a boy when I’m trying not to crash a twenty-four-MILLION-dollar fighter jet or going through my preflight checklist in Star City, Russia. In being the one to leave, in severing ties, I am making the best decision for this mission. This mission being my life.
Still, I wish there were a heartbreak sim.
That hole in my chest is so big now, I’m surprised everyone can’t see straight through me. I thought Annapolis would patch it up, somehow, but I feel almost worse. Which makes no sense. I even took my temperature yesterday, because I thought maybe I had mono or an undiagnosed respiratory condition. But I don’t.
I’ve almost reached Nah and Nate when a weird Hannah-and-Mom kind of thing happens: A girl walks by me wearing a Pac-Man T-shirt, where Pac-Man is eating up all the ghosts, and I think, hungry ghost, and then I have a Newtonian moment. EUREKA! I realize that this feeling I’m having, the hole, and Annapolis not filling it: I’m just as much of a hungry ghost as Nah. I thought I was doing things to avoid ghostism, but I have had this condition ALL ALONG.
Getting Annapolis was all that was keeping me from falling right into this hole in my chest. Now I’ve been accepted, and there is nothing to distract me. Nah’s sober, graduation’s a couple months away, I’m on the path to becoming an astronaut.
And yet this hole, this hole is eating me alive.
I stand there in the middle of Boston Common, stunned. This is what those old sages were talking about, and Tite Kubo, the author of Bleach. If I died right now, I’d be a Hollow, and Ichigo Kurosaki would have to battle me, and that Soul Reaper would totally kick my ass. Hungry ghosts aren’t just Hannah or the ghouls in Bleach—addicts or people with issues. Anyone can be a hungry ghost. EVERYONE is a hungry ghost.
I wrap my arms around myself and try really hard to feel my feet on the ground because I suddenly feel floaty, but not in a good, zero-gravity way.
I am an empty hole that nothing can fill.
Not even NASA.
I’ve lost everything.
Even the stars.
A thought that I have had many times since my parents died swirls round and round in my head, like space debris: Who am I?
If I’m not the girl who is going to be an astronaut, or the girl who is but isn’t over the moon about it, then WHO AM I?
“Oh god.”
I don’t know who I am. I DON’T KNOW WHO I AM.
Am I a daughter? But if my parents are dead, then does that un-daughter me? As my quantitative value of being an orphan has increased, the qualitative value has decreased. Before the wave, I was a lucky orphan. Now I’m just a particularly unique one.
Am I a sister, even though Nah and I don’t share blood? And if she starts using again and dies, then would I still have a sister, even if that sister doesn’t exist anymore?
Am I a girl who likes manga and brownies and boys that smell like coffee and wind?
Am I a member of the armed forces?
An honors student?
A girl? But what is gender really?
An atheist? But I feel my dead parents and that is not very atheistic.
An American? Yes, but only as long as there is something called America, which might not be that much longer, let’s be honest, or might be as long as ancient Greece, which would be a pretty good run, BUT THAT IS NOT THE POINT.
“Dad.” He can’t hear me, but I whisper his name again anyway, and my cognitive defects are becoming more and more apparent, and I think maybe the wave has filled me with something dead, because I am maybe dead inside.
I miss them so much.
I sit down right where I am, in the center of Boston Common, and I’m not sure I can get back up any time soon.
I am floating and sitting at the same time. I am living a Zen koan, an unsolvable riddle, like what is the sound of one hand clapping, which I never understood because ONE HAND CAN’T CLAP. And now I am holding up my hand and hitting the air—DAMN THESE ZEN BASTARDS. The sound of one hand clapping is nothing. So does that mean everything is nothing? No thing is a thing.
“Help,” I whisper.
“Mae? What’s wrong?”
I look up. Nah’s standing over me, a worried frown on her face.
“Nothing.” I keep clapping my one hand. “Nothing. It’s NOTHING.”
“Bullshit.”
I stand up, a little off-balance, because I can feel Earth rotating now, and it’s too fast.
My sister is so happy about the letter in my pocket. Annapolis was her Christmas gift to me. I can’t tell her I’m empty. That the hole in my spaceship is so big, I might not make it back to Earth. So I just stare at her.
“Mae. Tell me what’s up. You’re freaking my shit out right now.”
And if you’re on a spaceship that might not make it back to Earth, and maybe you’re all alone in a Soyuz you don’t know how to fly, like Dr. Stone in Gravity, then are you REALLY alone? Because she saw a dead person and they helped her get home. And I can’t help but feel like Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me die up there. I don’t believe in Hannah’s Something Else. But if there’s no Something Else, then why did Yuri—
“Mae, you are freaking me out. What is wrong?” She presses a hand to my forehead. “You’re all sweaty. Should we go home, or—”
“When Yuri Gagarin came back from space, he said something weird,” I say.
“Which one is Yuri Gaga—whatever?” Nah asks.
“Yuri Gagarin. The first human to enter space. 1961. Cosmonaut.”
“So Russia beat us to space?”
“We got the moon. Hannah, that’s not the POINT.” I press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets. Earth is going too fast.
“Whoa. Okay. What did he say?”
My hands drop. “He said: ‘I looked and looked but I didn’t see God.’”
“About when he was in space, you mean?” she says.
“Yes. Can you believe it?!”
“Okay … so he was an atheist in the Sov
iet Union. What’s so surprising about that? He’s just saying he has proof that God doesn’t exist. Or so he thinks.” She rolls her eyes. “Typical rocket scientist.”
I grip her shoulders. “But he looked, Nah. One of the foremost scientific minds in the world. He knew better. Why did he look? YURI GAGARIN IS FUCKING WITH MY SERENITY.”
Yuri didn’t just look: He looked—and looked. Like he was hoping to find something. Perhaps it was just dry Russian humor. But I’m not convinced. It’s that second looked that’s getting me. Looked and looked. Once: You’re a cheeky atheist. Twice: You really looked for God-with-a-capital-G up there. Just in case.
She cocks her head to the side. “How could he not? You get up there, you have to wonder, right? Some of the smartest people in the world—Mom included—believe there’s something out there. It’s not just the weirdos and little people who believe.” She leans in. “Also: He said he didn’t see God. But everyone knows you feel God.”
That gives me pause.
“What does God feel like?”
She loops her arm though mine, and we start toward where Nate is trying to get a tan.
“I think it’s different for everyone,” Nah says. “For me, it’s that feeling I get when I look at a kick-ass sunset over the ocean or when I realized Drew had been secretly using Dad’s miracle life lesson on me all along. When I read one of Yoko’s poems.”
“But that’s not God,” I say, stubborn. “That’s neurology. Psychology. Chemicals in your brain responding to outside stimuli.”
“Every culture has its own name for God, its own way of talking about God. Dad said he was an atheist, but get him talking about the universe and he sounded downright religious. He just used big science words instead of woo-woo words, whatever. We’re all talking about the same thing, I think. Remember what he said? I don’t need to pray. I just need to look into a telescope.” She grins, sneaky. “He looked and looked.”
“I’ll allow that it feels like an intelligence is at work,” I say. “But Dad always said that the universe is like a complex symphony playing itself, and our job is to listen.”
He also said he wanted to leave our mother. Maybe I should stop quoting him.
The hole widens because I am a hungry ghost and I want my dad to come back from the dead and make me a happy atheist again.
“Every symphony has a composer,” Nah says. “And every orchestra a conductor. Remember The Phantom Tollbooth?”
I always loved that part, where the conductor conducts the rising of the sun. As though everything that happens in the universe is the result of a grand orchestra’s symphonic dexterity, led by an all-knowing conductor.
“It’s just a story, Nah,” I say.
“I hate that word,” she says with surprising vehemence.
“What?”
“Just.”
Before I can ask why, say more, we reach the blanket, where Nate is sunning himself, wearing a pair of tiny shorts and a little tank that says NEVER TRUST AN ATOM—THEY MAKE UP EVERYTHING.
“Good one,” I say, nodding to the shirt.
He grins. “I bought you one, too.”
Nah plops onto the blanket and holds up her phone. “I made you an Annapolis playlist.”
The hole gets smaller. “You made a playlist?”
This is Hannah before the pills, back from the dead.
She smiles. “It was time, don’t you think?”
I nod. “What’s this one called?”
“Rocket Girl. But now it’s clear I have to make a sequel called Yuri Gagarin Is Fucking with My Serenity.”
Nate lets out a yelp. “Oh my god. We need to unpack that statement right the fuck now.”
Nah glances at me. “Maybe later.”
She hits PLAY, and Elton John’s “Rocket Man” comes out of the little speaker, and I am very impressed because all of us know the words. We sing them together, and I’m also very sad because these two people I love have no idea that right at this precise moment I’m a rocket man, rocket man burning out his fuse up here all alone. When the song finishes, Nah hits PAUSE.
“That’s it?” I ask.
“There are twelve more songs, but Nate and I have other programming for this afternoon.” She looks at my cousin. Nods.
Nate sits up and hands me a small gift bag. “I was told to pass this along to you.”
Ben.
I instinctively put my hands behind my back, but Nah reaches out and plucks it from him.
“If you don’t open it, I will,” she says.
I look at the bag. She sneaks a hand in, and I snatch it away. They stare at me, expectant.
“That gelato looks really good,” I say, giving a cart a few feet away a pointed look.
Nate bounds to his feet. “Come on, cuz,” he says to Nah. “You and I are going on a space walk.”
I wait until they’re well away before I pull out the tissue paper. Ben touched this, I think.
When I see what’s inside, I stop breathing.
Ben has gotten me a piece of the universe.
Two hundred twenty-six grams of outer space are sitting in my hand. A meteorite. It is a polished piece of gnarled rock with a little gold stand to hold it.
There is a note.
To: Commander Winters
From: Mission Specialist Tamura
The specimen in this little bag fell to Earth around 2,200 BC (the geophysicist in me must inform you that this date was determined via carbon dating of the charred wood fragments taken from beneath the meteorite itself). This bit of the cosmos was discovered in a field called Campo Del Cielo—since you are taking Russian and not Spanish, I’ll translate for you, Comrade: Field of the Sky. This bit of outer space you’re holding in your hand (in your palm, where you also hold a certain someone across the Charles River), hit the atmosphere of our little blue dot after traveling 150,000 miles per hour.
Someday you will do the same.
You will go to space, solve mysteries, do somersaults in zero gravity, see sixteen sunsets and sunrises a day. And then, when you’re ready, you will get in a little capsule and—just like this meteorite—hurtle through a blaze of fire before landing on Earth. From so far away, you will come back. I know it.
And I’ll be waiting to welcome you home.
For Science—
Ben
Maybe Nah was right. God is a feeling. This feeling. Of empty and whole at the same time. Of holding on while letting go. Because that’s what Ben did—he let go of me, but he never stopped holding on. If there were a wave and we were in it, I bet that water couldn’t ever break us apart, not really.
Because it didn’t break any of us apart. I can let go of my parents—of their selves, and my idea of who they were and who we were as a family—but I can still hold on, too.
Up to sixty percent of the adult human body is water. Water can’t break itself. So the wave couldn’t break my family because we are made of the same stuff as the wave. WE ARE THE WAVE.
I close my eyes and lie down, the meteorite clutched to my chest, pressing against the hole. Holding the universe in the palm of my hand.
I listen.
To the fire burning in the center of the globe.
To the laughter and talking and living noises of the people all around. Babies and children and adults. Life. Car horns honking and the faint sound of a guitar. The bell of a passing ice-cream vendor.
The sounds swirl around me, in me, through me, waves, the wave. All these atoms—this blanket I’m lying on, this air I breathe, this meteorite, this heart, this skin, these people, and these trees—none of it solid, all of it shifting and changing and moving, just atoms held together by dancing electrons.
Solidity is an illusion. We know this. We know that nothing is actually solid in the way we think of it, it’s just simply the varying levels of resistance of the electrons in the atoms of objects that come into contact with one another.
Nothing is solid.
Everything changes—everything.
But …
I grip the meteorite.
River’s hands: ONLY LOVE.
Dad didn’t stop loving me. He’s dead, but he didn’t stop loving me. And Nah almost dying, hurting herself, that didn’t mean she didn’t love me—it meant she didn’t love herself. And even though people have left me, I am still surrounded by people who haven’t: Gram, Papa, Nah, Nate, Aunt Nora, Uncle Tony.
And now Ben.
I have lost so many people, but there has never been a time in my life when no one loved me. Even my birth mother might have loved me. She gave me up because she knew she couldn’t care for me. Maybe she loved me enough to let me go.
Everything changes, but love is the constant.
Love is the constant.
In this crazy experiment of life, with all its variables, all its unknowns, that is the only thing that doesn’t change.
And if love is the constant, then love is the only safe bet.
Everyone leaves; everyone dies.
But love doesn’t.
Like atoms. It changes, morphs, but it never dies.
There are some things you don’t need an equation for.
The hole in me gets wider, deeper, but it’s not a hole. It’s an air-lock, burst wide open because I don’t need to stay locked in this capsule anymore, looking through a tiny window, on the outside of the universe looking in.
I’m not empty.
I am filled with the universe. I come from that same atom the entire cosmos was born from. I’m not just filled with it, I am it. I am the universe.
I am zero gravity and stars being born and dying and black holes and quintessence—I am filled with dark matter, with an energy field that’s expanding with the universe. So if the universe is expanding, then ALL OF US ARE EXPANDING WITH IT.
We’re all part of this vast Etch-A-Sketch that is constantly reshaping itself. When we die, we get shaped into something else, we return to that creative energetic essence we came from. We’re not just this one thing—we are ALL THE THINGS. This is quintessence, the Philosopher’s Stone. This is what Dad was on the brink of. This is what he was listening for. The point of it all.
Little Universes Page 34