by Adam Nemett
“Smile!” Mathias said. “Smile at your collarbone, for it still works and you are still alive!”
As he drove away, Mathias tossed David an orange pill bottle. David watched the brake lights disappear out of Woosamonsa Court and then, unscrewing the pill bottle’s cap, David poured its contents into his palm. He found himself holding a pile of shavings.
It was hair. Stubble. Hundreds of millimeters of hair, a mound of short follicles.
They were soft and sharp all at once.
vi.
The first time David failed to save a woman’s life was in elementary school. Her name was Claire Shiller and red curls somersaulted off her head onto her neck and shoulders. Their mothers met in a Jazzercise class. Occasionally the kids were brought along and put in a kind of drop-in class at the bowling alley next door. They were shy around each other until, on lane six, Claire approached him as if dealing illicit goods and whispered, “How do you make yourself shrink?”
Ashamed, David admitted he had no such power.
“Yes, you can make yourself shrink,” Claire insisted. She explained how he shrunk every time they said goodbye and her parents led her away from him. Claire was fascinated by this special property of David’s. She didn’t want to hear that things simply look smaller when they’re farther away, until they disappear at the horizon. She asked whether David could feel it happening, the shrinking, and she vowed right then never to do it, to only grow bigger and bigger and bigger. David never thought to ask her why she believed only he had the power to shrink. Even in first grade, you don’t question logic when a wonderful girl thinks you’re special, too. She asked David what the shrinking felt like, if it felt weird, and he said yes, it felt weird but, you know, no big deal.
Back when Claire Shiller came to play at his house, Dr. Seuss was part of their sweet routine. They’d make a tent together, draping a blanket over the tops of two armchairs and hunkering in the white cave made between them. Their fortress. Inside, he read aloud the tale of Morris McGurk’s wild plans made real, reciting If I Ran the Circus rhymes while Claire studied illustrations of old Mr. Sneelock’s vacant lot evolving into a glorious big top spectacle. Reading was his favorite.
And when David went to play at Claire’s house, they did her favorite thing. She’d wait until the sun was setting and then take his hand and lead him outside. The flagstones winding through her backyard were still hot from the day, and Claire removed her shoes and stepped onto each flat polygon, showing David how to soak in the delicious heat through the soles of one’s feet. He followed, staring at her bare toes, staring at the red curls falling down her back. The stones were cooler by the time he reached them, having given their gifts to Claire. But he didn’t mind at all. They’d reach the end of the hardscaping, and then Claire would ease into the soft backyard grass.
“C’mon,” she’d say. “We’re making tea.”
Claire was a sensory being. She craved the fuzzy feel of pajamas and wore them always. Her parents kept a small garden of vegetables and herbs, but she could never make it there directly. Stopping every few feet, she’d crouch down to gather rocks, sticks, and daffodils like wispy babies into the cradle of her pajama shirt. At the yard’s lone tree, her fingers picked at the trunk and came away with bugs or hunks of bark, more savory ingredients. David worried he didn’t have the same instinct for collecting. He gathered what he could: some grass, some dirt. On a particularly inspired afternoon, he might wade into the pachysandra and grab a pristine leaf to add to her brew.
“Is this one poisonous?” he’d ask her.
“No, that one’s good,” she confirmed. “It makes you strong. But find more red. Like the berries from last time. Red is really good for your hair and eyes!”
David ran off thinking, Okay, red, red, red, red. And the garden! Parsley, bell peppers, red(!) Indian clay from the earth below and fallen seedpods from branches above. They gathered them all. But mainly, David watched Claire. She’d point. Wide-eyed, she’d pick out her favorite finds and tell him why she liked them so much. She smelled positively everything, so he did also. And even then, he thought, I don’t care, Claire, what they think little kids don’t understand. I’m so very in love with you.
When her mother called them back inside, they’d pour their plunder onto the kitchen table and ask, very nicely, if she would cook the tea. Mrs. Shiller always obliged. She told them to run along upstairs while she prepped and brewed. At nightfall they’d drink. It was delicious. Their palates became increasingly sensitive to the individual ingredients.
“You can really taste the Indian clay,” Claire would say, twirling a ringlet of her hair. “See?”
When his mother came to collect David, he’d tell her all about their fun.
“Be careful,” she’d say, “you know, some of those plants might be poisonous. Make sure you know what you’re drinking.”
“No, you don’t understand,” David told his mother. “Claire knows everything.”
But then Claire Shiller began to grow.
Not her whole body. Just her skull. It started in the forehead.
During naptime, when the world was horizontal, David asked her the secret of how she made her forehead grow. She told him it was because of someone named Luke Hemia.
David was destroyed. She’d made a vow, promised him and promised herself, that she’d never shrink, only get bigger and bigger and bigger, and now someone else, not David, had unlocked her ability to grow. He’d been replaced. Had Luke forced his huge-brained powers on Claire? And Claire had fresh bruises. Was this Luke a bully?
A distance grew between them. For several weeks David experienced his grief privately, until Claire stopped coming to school altogether, and then he could take no more. During dinner one night he began to cry and his parents asked why and David told them the truth.
Claire had grown and gone away without him.
Mom made a phone call and then sat David down in the living room. His dad paced and picked at his beard. Eileen twisted her long hair into a bun. She pressed her knees up against David’s and rubbed her thumb over his eyebrow.
“Claire isn’t gone,” his mom said. “But she’s very sick. She has something called leukemia.”
David scrunched his face and shot bull-snorts through his nostrils. He wanted to kill him.
“I know,” he said, sulking. “She told me about him.”
“No, honey, it’s not a him. It’s a sickness that some people get, even children.”
“Is it bad?”
“It can be bad. But we hope not,” she said. “See, our bodies are made of tiny little cells, and there are good cells who fight the bad cells that make us sick. It’s really rare, but with leukemia a bad thing happens to the good cells and they get confused and they just keep making more and more of themselves until there’s no more room. They don’t know how to stop. And they’re still good cells, but they just get so crowded and confused that they can’t fight off the bad cells anymore. And that’s why Claire is feeling sick.”
David wanted to help. And he was confused. How could he save a girl whose attacker was invisible, hidden inside her body? How do you fight something so tiny, so huge?
“I think it would help if you went to visit her,” his parents said. And the next day they kept him out of school and made the drive to Mercy Medical Center in downtown Baltimore.
The pediatrics ward was another planet where everyone existed in slow motion and the machines all sounded like lonely pianos. The ammonia smell made David’s eyes water, and he didn’t want it to look like he was crying. He shadowed his mother through the hallways, burying his face in the towering trunk of her thigh whenever it became too much. Adults gathered around children in beds, children whose heads had grown into enormous bald globes and whose faces had lost their color. David figured, This is where they bring all the children who’ve figured out how to grow their heads.
He saw Claire’s parents before he saw Claire. When he looked out from behind his mother’s leg,
David found that Claire had not only figured out how to grow her skull, but the roots and sinews of some living, breathing machine were flourishing from her tiny form. She was bald. It was all gone. Without hair, David thought she looked just like a little baby, like his sister, Beth, when she first came home from the hospital, and inside him something jumped when he imagined he could see Claire like that; like he’d known her since she was born.
But despite Gil and Eileen’s assurances, David couldn’t shake his guilt.
“Look, Claire. Look who’s here!” Claire’s mom, who looked really bad, draped a blue blanket over her daughter’s bald head. David’s father picked him up, and suddenly David was looking down at Claire in her hospital bed. She looked even smaller now.
Maybe she was shrinking, too.
“Hi, David,” she said, and smiled the way she used to. “Do you still make the tea?”
“No,” he said. Not without her.
“They have me on chemo,” she said. “My lymphoids are up.”
“You look like a baby,” he said.
Her eyes sank away from David, retreating into puddles that shook and spilled down to her mouth. David couldn’t understand. What had he said? His parents had warned him to be nice. Claire, in her new body and bare head, had helped him travel back through time, allowed him to see her at her most pure. She was a baby again. A teeny pristine thing full of only good.
In that moment, it was the nicest thing he could think to say.
The parents covered up David’s blunder. They tried laughing, diverting her attention back to the lymphoids. Meanwhile, David waited for the world to suspend its animation or cycle back on itself, for Spider-Man to make hair sprout from her head. But that never happened. Time kept moving forward. Claire kept being bald. Before they left the hospital, David asked Dad to pick him up so he could look at Claire again. There was one more thing he needed to tell her.
“I’m sorry I was so bad,” he whispered.
He was bad because he could not fight some evil genius or hunt down clues that would save her life. He was bad for being so bad. He was bad because, one night, months ago, he’d forgotten to ask her if his leaves were poisonous, and he’d sat silently by and watched as she drank the fatal tea that was now making her shrink and shrink and shrink back to an invisible beginning.
PART TWO
5
January
i.
Two big things happened in January. First, Pfizer officially unleashed Zeronal on the global marketplace. The commercials were nonstop, and the pill soon became the most successful product launch in pharmaceutical history, reaching the coveted $1 billion “blockbuster” status in only a month. This was no surprise to David or anyone else in The Egg. The general public needed Zeronal to extend their shortening days. And though David understood that enlightenment was not achieved via magic bullets, he also believed zero was a window, a supercharger, pointing at where humanity needed to go. And so was the USV.
The second thing. In January the lawyers representing J. Stuart Mott announced a settlement: his publication in the journal Science establishing the now famous notion of chronostrictesis would heretofore be shared with its rightful coauthor, a Princeton undergrad credited as “Ultraviolet,” who contributed the kernel of the discovery as well as quantitative data analysis establishing the possible Null Point date of June 6. Ultraviolet released a statement, against his lawyer’s advice, that soon took on the dubious gravity associated with all crackpot prophets:
The gods grow sick of our noise. The Big Bang explodes upon the universe and sweeps us toward the supercell like waves pulled to the moon. The world will spin and shake us off. Rivers will run backward. But for the vigilant, the heroic and evolved, we will pass through the dark neck of time, zero in, and emerge luminous without end.
Eye-rolling ensued. But some saw the recent hurricanes and blizzards as proof of this prophecy, speculating on the coded meaning of “the dark neck.” Others went so far as to suggest that this so-called Ultraviolet might be placed in the pantheon of revolutionary theoretical physicists, alongside names like Newton and Einstein. The scientific blogosphere went nuts.
“A supermassive black hole is causing erratic celestial orbits,” said the astrophysicists.
“New atmospheric reagents will be formed and their unforeseen molecular-level interactions with mechanical and biological processes will ultimately destroy us,” posited the chemical engineers.
“It’s all hooey,” said the Republicans.
David would have loved to connect with Mathias—to transform his glory into action, strike while the iron was hot—but their leader was still nowhere to be found. He’d be back soon, though.
Any minute now.
— Ø —
Haley sat on the steps of Foulke Hall, off to the side, allowing students to travel past her as they loaded back into their rooms. Fresh from winter break, they carried furnishings and books from the U-Store. They carried cases of AA, AAA, C, and D batteries, cell phone batteries, lithium ion batteries for laptops. You had to have at least a dozen charged backups for when the power went off for days at a time, which just happened now.
The sky looked strange to Haley. Uniform cloud cover glowing with backlight. It was a decent day, though, and Princeton had seen fit to move its event outside, to the lawn below that toweringly photogenic Blair Arch. Haley watched as kids stood in lines. Bought merch. Signed their names on clipboards galore at the Activities Fair. No time to lose.
She wished she smoked cigarettes, or felt like looking at her phone, or had something to make her look busy. A pang of self-consciousness ran through her as she glanced at semifamiliar faces passing her for the fifth time, offering closed-lip smiles and half-averted eyes. Haley wondered or worried, or maybe she was just curious, if they knew who she was, if she was recognizable in that way. As her mind closed in on itself, Haley bounded from the stairs and jogged off toward the Activities Fair below Blair Arch, hoping to get lost in a crowd.
Instead, as she browsed the arrays of 2022 calendars and fuzzy black light posters, the throw pillows and leather goods embossed and emblazoned with the orange-and-black Princeton seal, she felt more conspicuous than ever. She hadn’t worn the right thing, for starters. Typically, she would’ve agonized over an outfit, something new she’d copped during break and was ready to debut. Today she was wearing a boxy yellow sweater and sweatpants that weren’t the cute kind of sweatpants. She plucked a black hooded sweatshirt off a table and decided it fit.
Haley caught two girls looking at her, pretending to browse the sterling silver mugs. One looked away and the other held her gaze, briefly, and nodded. Haley understood the look to mean something like: I know what you’re going through, because it also happened to me. Haley wondered if she really knew, or if she’d just experienced an unwanted kiss or grope or something brief and disgusting while she was sleeping. You were not raped the way I was raped, she caught herself thinking. Stop trying to combine your story with mine. And then she immediately hated herself for thinking this.
Because maybe this girl really did know.
Either way, Haley looked away sharply and spotted David and his crew, sans Mathias, standing there under Blair Arch. Haley booked it toward that grand flight of steps leading to David Fuffman, feeling just fine about stealing the sweatshirt.
From his perch overlooking the Princeton campus, David didn’t immediately spot Haley Roth. He was considering the mass, not the individuals. He laughed, watching them all scurry. Only a few months ago, this had been him.
In light of new belief systems nurtured by the Big Bang—namely, their impending doom and/or evolution—this hullabaloo seemed so futile. Even China and the escalating hostilities there seemed small and distant in comparison.
They’d agreed none of them would register for classes. What would be the point? They each had their passions and projects. Extraneous busy-work would only get in the way, and a degree was meaningless. David tried not to hate his parents
and teachers for all those hours he’d spent memorizing SAT flash cards. Months and years wasted, sweating the small stuff. Nevertheless, David had already registered for his religion, entrepreneurship, and environmental studies classes. He didn’t see the need to drop them outright like the others had. He could just not do the work. And it couldn’t hurt to have a fallback in case apocalypse didn’t work out.
It was then he spotted Haley, shrouded in a black hood, striding two stairs at a time up to Blair Arch, headed right for him. David stepped away from Lee, Owen, and Fu, asked them to give him a minute. He watched Haley’s performance, her leaps feminine and athletic like a figure skater’s. When she got to the top, she held her fists in the air.
“Not bad, Rocky,” David said.
“Who’s Rocky?” she asked. “Just kidding, I’ve seen it. Seriously, you should see the old-school movie posters down there. They’re from another time and place, I swear.”
“Do they still sell that John Belushi Animal House poster where he’s wearing the sweatshirt that just says COLLEGE?”
“Who’s John Belushi?” she asked. “Sorry, I’ll stop. But yeah, it’s like: yup, college in the 2020s is just one long, sweet-ass keg party. With flooding and blizzards.”
“I like your new hoodie, that’s a nice score,” David offered, pointing at the hanging price tag. “I feel like every time I see you, there’s commerce involved.”
“Bitches be shopping.” Haley shrugged, ripping off the tag. “But this? A dorm room poster sale? Really? Now?”
They smiled at each other. They’d both graduated to something beyond and recognized each other as Other enough to be familiar.
Haley asked if the trio of guys by the bike rack were indeed the USV she’d costumed.
“Nah,” David said. “Just buddies from Forbes.”
“Really?” she asked. “That skinny guy is exactly how I pictured Lee.”
“Nope.” David shook his head, not knowing where to put his hands.