Chasing Orion

by Kathryn Lasky

  I imagined some darned librarian wearing a cowboy hat, chaps, spurs, the works. I liked my librarians to look like librarians. They should look like they read, not like they roped cows. There was even a short split-rail fence with a fake rustic sign that said NORTH SIDE BRANCH LIBRARY. But the wood ended there. The ranch house, or El Rancho, as I suddenly named it, was made of Indiana limestone, a pale grayish stone that a lot of the new houses were built of. And wow, did it look hot. I know that white is supposed to reflect and make things cooler inside. Like white cars are cooler than black ones in the summertime. But this ugly building looked like it was broiling. “OK, sweetie, have fun. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

  I stepped out of the car and felt like a hot iron was pressing down on me.

  I might be walking into an oven! I’ll be cooked. Barbecued! Hansel and Gretel, Hoosier style. I looked back at Mom. She was already pulling away. I missed our old library: a brick two-story building on a shady street with two big maple trees by the front steps. There wasn’t a breath of wind here. Just the glare from the sun, merciless on this rambling pile of limestone. Calcium carbonate — that’s what Indiana limestone is. I had done a report on it for social studies. I could name the three most important quarries in southern Indiana. Tell you all about the marine fossils that had decomposed from the inland sea. Yes, once upon a time in the post-Cambrian but pre-cornfield era, this had all been a sea. I walked in a heat daze toward the door. “It better be cool in there,” I muttered.

  I walked through the door and felt a blast of ice-cold air. “Aaaaahh!”

  “Nice, isn’t it?” A voice came out of the shadows. Then a woman padded silently toward me. She wasn’t wearing chaps, no spurs in sight. Gads, she was a sight for sore eyes. She had a shawl, an actual shawl, around her shoulders, and she was carrying an armload of books. Not only that: she wasn’t wearing shoes — just golf socks with those mini puff-balls on the heels that kept them from sliding down into golf shoes (had she been wearing them). That’s why her steps were so quiet. “I’ve made some lemonade. Help yourself. It’s over there on the round table in the corner.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered.

  “And if it gets too cold, I have extra sweaters.”

  It had not simply been the air-conditioning that made me want to go to the library but a new idea I had had for a small world — the small universe one. I had decided that my idea of making a diorama of the sky was not such a bad one at all. Maybe call it a sky-o-rama instead of a diorama. I was amazed that I had never thought of this before. I had often put the moon and stars into my small worlds, but just as background details. I would use Day-Glo paint or glitter on glue for those. But now I had decided to actually use real electricity. Emmett said I could power it with dry-cell batteries and use those teeny-weeny bulbs that are in flashlights. It could really be beautiful. So I had spent a lot of time thinking about the electrical details, but then I realized that I didn’t actually have a story. Somehow my mythology book had gotten lost in the move. And I needed to figure out a good story. All the constellations had mythological stories connected to them. It was just as if ancient people looked up into the night and saw some kind of picture and then decided they had to make up a story to go with it. It was like their religion, and they figured the gods must have put all that glitter up there. None of it Christian, of course, but they had as many gods and as many versions of gods getting mixed up with people and animal stories as there are kinds of religion today. I only knew the basic outlines of most of the myths.

  I asked the librarian, who was still padding around in golf socks, where the Greek mythology section was. She pointed toward the opposite corner and said turn left at the poster of — duh! — Zeus. So I did. I had to walk back through the rows of bookshelves, and when I got to the very last row, where the 290s were, I caught sight of something squashed in the corner. If the something had not been reading a book, I would have thought it was a bag of laundry.

  How should I explain this? The laundry bag looked up when she heard me and blinked at me through round glasses with thin wire rims. Her hair sprung out in a dark electrified frizzle from her head, and she had the palest skin I ever saw. There was something about her shape, too, that suddenly reminded me of a mushroom. Her skin was maybe the color of one of those very white mushrooms — cultivated mushrooms, and not one of the wild ones that grow in the woods. Yes, a mushroom exactly, I thought.

  “Hi,” she said softly, in a voice I instantly thought of as very mushroom, if indeed they ever spoke.

  “Hi,” I said, and turned back to looking at the books on the shelf. I looked for maybe a minute, and then I heard the soft voice again.

  “If you need one of the ones I’m using, feel free.” I looked over and saw that she had a huge stack of books on the floor beside her. She was sitting on one of those beanbag things, more or less growing out of it rather than sitting. “What are you looking for?”

  “Myths about the sky.”

  “Oh, yeah, here’s one.” She held out a book. The title was Myths and Constellations. “It’s not altogether accurate.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No, it claims that the earliest references to the mythological significance of constellations are in the Iliad, seventh century BC. But actually there are cuneiform references from six thousand years ago.”

  “Oh!” I said. What else could I say? I wasn’t sure what cuneiform was, but I certainly had the feeling that I was speaking to a form of life that was higher than fungal. Then she smiled. It was a fragile smile, and it made her face pretty. “There’s another beanbag right there, if you want to sit down.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and dragged the beanbag over so I would be closer to the pile of books. Then I sank down into the fake leather puffiness and opened the book she gave me. I began reading the story of Callisto and Arcas. Not exactly a jolly tale. Callisto has been romanced by Zeus, who had to disguise himself because his wife, Hera, was jealous. She gives birth to a son, Arcas. Hera finds out and is so ticked off that she turns Callisto into a bear. One day her son sees her and doesn’t recognize her as his mother. He raises his bow to shoot her. But Zeus, looking down from Olympus, sees what is about to happen and saves the day and magically turns Arcas into a little bear. Then he grabs both mother and son by their tails and hurls them out into the sky.

  The Mushroom looked over at what I was reading. “Oh, Callisto. Sad. Matricide always is . . . intentional or not.”

  “You mean killing his mother?”

  “Yeah, but luckily he didn’t.” The Mushroom sighed.

  I looked at her more closely. “What’s your name?”

  “Evelyn Winkler. What’s yours?”

  “Georgia Mason, but everyone calls me Georgie.”

  “Me too?” There was something so pathetic about her question. It was almost as if she had never had a close friend.

  “Of course. I said everyone, Evelyn.” I would never think of her as the Mushroom again. And actually a slight blush rose in her pale white cheeks. She smiled and looked pretty again.

  “Why are you interested in myths about the sky?” she asked.

  I began to explain about my small worlds and why I was looking for a good star story. We talked and talked. Evelyn was very nice and very smart. Both her mom and her dad were doctors. I had never heard of a lady doctor before. “What kind of doctor?” I asked.

  “My mom’s a gynecologist.”

  I wasn’t really sure what a gynecologist was, but I asked, “Does she ever have polio patients?”

  She looked at me kind of funny. So I said really quickly, “Just wondering, because the girl who lives next door to us is in an iron lung.”

  “Gee whiz, is she pregnant or something?” Evelyn asked.

  This really threw me for a loop. “No, why?”

  “Well, when you asked if my mom did anything with polio and told me about this girl, I thought maybe she was going to have a baby. That’s the other part of being a gynecologist. She�
��s an obstetrician, too. She delivers babies. But have you met this girl in the iron lung?”

  “Oh, no. We just moved into the neighborhood.”

  “I never heard of a person at home in an iron lung. Boy, kind of weird, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is.”

  “I wonder if you’ll ever get to meet her,” Evelyn said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, if you do, you don’t have to worry about catching anything. It’s no longer infectious after the person has come down with it.”

  “I know. Not transmissible. I read a lot about polio.”

  “Did you know that they used to think it was a poor people’s disease? But that was all wrong.”

  “Really? I never read that.”

  “Yep. The virus spreads through people not washing their hands after pooping and other bodily secretions.” I wasn’t sure what the word secretions meant, but I could take a pretty good guess — pee, possibly. I thought of how when I was really little I had often peed in swimming pools, rather than taking the time to get out and walk all the way to a bathroom. “But it’s actually the poor people with bad sewers that built up an immunity to those viruses.”

  “So it’s rich people with better sewers who get it now.”

  “Yep,” Evelyn said, and blinked.

  Of course, now we had moved into this new fancy neighborhood that probably had much better sewers than our old neighborhood. Not that I ever noticed anything wrong with the plumbing. It turned out that Evelyn and her family had just moved, too. They had lived closer to the downtown of Indianapolis before and she had gone to a special school for really smart kids, an exam school where you had to take a test to get in. But now her parents felt it was too long a drive to that school. So she would be going to the same new school as I would. This was some consolation. At least I would know someone.

  Before I knew it, the hour was up and Mom was coming in the front door of the library. But Evelyn and I made plans to meet there the next day. We exchanged phone numbers. I checked out a whole mess of books. Just before I was going out the door, Evelyn came and said, “You never told me what your favorite constellation is, Georgie.” She smiled when she said my name. It was as if she just enjoyed the sound of it.

  “Orion! It’s so beautiful. The jeweled sword, the club, the lion skin that he drags across the winter sky. But it’s a really sad story.”

  “But if you love it, you should do it.”

  “Maybe so,” I said softly.

  I did love the Orion story, and there were as many versions of that as any of the rest. The problem with myths is that there are a lot of contradictory things, irrational parts, pieces left out and unexplained. I like reasons for stuff. There were a lot of gaps in the Orion story and a lot of things you had to take on faith. I was even thinking of a two-level diorama because Orion’s story begins in the sea. He was the son of Poseidon. Underwater filtered light — I could use an aquarium for part of it. We had two in the basement. I realized I would literally have to build this story from the seafloor up to the sky, or more accurately, from the basement up.

  I went there as soon as I got home and found the aquarium. I had been thinking about the “seascaping.” I was pretty good with clay. I knew I could model a great seafloor. But then I had a really brilliant idea. In that stand of trees between our house and the polio girl’s, the only shady place in our new neighborhood, I had seen some moss. It would be really neat if I could get some and stick it in the clay. I had once made a moss garden and kept it alive just by spritzing it twice a week. I liked the idea of having something living in this diorama. Live plants and real electricity. This might become my masterpiece — truly a small universe!

  The temperature had dropped ten whole degrees since I had come home. But in the shade of the grove, it was even cooler. Maybe the arctic nineties. Even from the edge of the grove I could see the shimmer of the iron lung. By the time I was right in the grove, I could hear it pumping away. Then I heard Mom calling me and Emmett’s voice much closer.

  “Mom wants to know if you want to go with her to the Hoosier Twirler thing.”

  Just at that moment there was another voice. “Is somebody there?” Emmett and I looked at each other as a woman walked through the trees. She was wearing Bermuda shorts and had gardening gloves on. She held a pair of shears in her hand. “Oh, my goodness. You must be the Mason children. I’ve been meaning to come over and introduce myself. I’m Roslyn Keller. I would love it if you would come over and meet our Phyllis. We just wheeled her out, now that it’s cooler. She loves to be outside, even on the hottest days.” She said this as if it were the most ordinary thing that people got wheeled around in iron lungs.

  “Sure,” I said. I quickly forgot my mission of collecting moss.

  “What’s your name, dear?”

  “Georgie.”

  “And yours?” she said, turning to Emmett.

  “Emmett.”

  “Oh, you look like you’re about to be a senior. Just Phyllis’s age. This will mean so much to her.”

  I ran home to tell Mom to go without me and then followed Mrs. Keller through the trees and into the long shadows of their yard, which was beautiful, with lush green grass and really big trees. We passed a flower bed thick with violets and inky green lilies of the valley. None of the lilies had their little white bells. “These lilies in May were always Phyllis’s favorite.” It made me shiver when Mrs. Keller said that. Was she talking about the flowers being dead and gone by, or Phyllis? It was as if we were being brought to meet a dead person. I was scared. I kind of wanted to hold Emmett’s hand. But I thought that would look really dumb. Suddenly a terrible thought struck me: What if Phyllis was wearing a diaper? In the newsreels and in the newspapers, they were always showing people in iron lungs, grown-up people, wearing baby diapers with their skinny ugly legs sticking out. I could not meet this girl if she was going to be in a diaper. And what about Emmett? Emmett was seventeen years old, and this girl was supposed to be a teenager. This would be so embarrassing. Oh, good Lord! I thought. I tried to imagine Veronica or Betty in diapers and Jughead and Archie looking at them. This was just too awful. I could hardly move my feet forward.

  There was no turning back now. The machine, huge and glinting, was just ahead. Like some monster insect in a horror movie, its arms were reaching out toward us. We were suddenly caught in a radiant cross fire of reflected beams bouncing off the iron lung. I had to squint. It was as if she had been swallowed by this mechanical multi-eyed bug, every bit of her except for her head and neck. She was completely enclosed in the belly of this shining, glittering creature. The shell of the beast must have measured at least ten feet long and maybe a yard wide. So after I got by the metallic body and the shock of not seeing a human one except for this weirdly disembodied head, I saw Emmett’s and my faces crowding into mirrors. There were mirrors on almost every arm of the machine, and they all seemed to be reflecting us. Some mysterious force was rotating them, turning and tracking our movements. It was like an ambush of mirrors, and we were caught in a web of reflections.

  “Hi. I’m Phyllis,” a voice said. But I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. The whooshing mechanical monster seemed to be sucking in almost every sound, swallowing up every whisper of the true wind and every birdsong from the trees. “Oh, hi.” Emmett laughed nervously. I followed where he was looking. A head with a mass of white-blond curls protruded from the opening of the glistening metal shell and rested on a pillow. A thick rubber collar encircled her neck.

  Beneath the gusty whooshing of the machine there was another sound, sharper and hissing, still a part of the monster’s breath. I felt my chest tighten as if I might have to struggle for my next breath.

  “What’s your name?” Phyllis asked. The mirrors all rotated to reflect just me.

  “G-G-Georgie . . . Georgie.”

  “And I’m Emmett,” Emmett said.

  “I know the sound of the Creature breathing sort of takes your own breath away.
Don’t worry, Georgie. You can breathe fine. Just relax. Sit down. Mother, get some lemonade for them.”

  “Certainly, dear.”

  It was kind of strange when she asked her mother to do this. It wasn’t like a kid speaking to a parent, exactly. It was as if she were giving an order military style, the way one would if one were the captain of a ship or the pilot of a plane, or spaceship for that matter. This might as well have been a spaceship. She was certainly in a space that none of us had been. I noticed that although she was talking to me now, it was only Emmett’s face in her mirrors.

  “Some people, when they get around this thing, it makes them short of breath. Just remember, Georgie, you’ve got all the air in the world, the whole sky up there.” Emmett’s face slipped out of the mirrors. They mysteriously swiveled and tipped up, capturing clouds and blue sky. “I have eighty-seven cubic centimeters of air, but you have the world.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. And it wasn’t exactly the air that was getting stuck in me. It was the words. I looked hard at Phyllis. She could talk. But there was an unvarying rhythm to Phyllis’s speech. It was the rhythm of the machine. She and the machine were one. The Creature set the pace, which was always the same. Neverthless I had this sudden thought that Phyllis in a sense was a kind of stutterer, but instead of words clotting for her, it was air. Phyllis was a stutterer of air.

  For a brief time in the first grade I stuttered. I got over it very quickly, but I can still remember that there was this terrible sense of isolation because the words just dangled out there in front of me in a kind of half-light. I would reach for them, and a wind would blow them away or a shadow would pass over, and they would vanish into some dark empty place. I was always left with the horrible feeling that I would never be able to find the right word. It was a kind of death, a bunch of little deaths I suffered every day. And the loneliness was the worst part because I felt so disconnected. But, thank goodness, it ended.