It's a Whole Spiel

by It's a Whole Spiel- Love, Latkes

  I hadn’t noticed that I was, but I was. It was something I did when I got nervous, which I also was. Easier to look down than up sometimes, especially when up meant Levi’s dark brown eyes with their Venus-flytrap lashes.

  “Oh, well…I was just…uh…checking on the space station.” I glanced down and saw the updates. Space walk aborted. Egress not optimal. Possible ammonia leak. People were talking about the Challenger explosion and the Columbia explosion and the Apollo 1 fire. Warning of the worst space disaster in decades. Official statement from mission control to come.

  “What’s going on with it?”

  “Just, um, like…” I didn’t want to geek out too much. “Kind of a crisis? They got hit by space debris? It’s pretty serious? Four different countries have astronauts up there?” Why was everything coming out of my mouth like a question?

  “Damn,” Levi said. “It’s like our own Tower of Babel. They keep falling, and we keep building them.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.” He fidgeted with his prayer beads. “I don’t mean to be all theological; I just get like that sometimes. I’ll let you take your shower.”

  Now I had a problem. How could I take my shower with Levi, of all people, right there?

  When astronauts are faced with a tough situation, they “work the problem” with a decision tree, spelling out each choice in a given scenario and its probable consequences. Right now, on the International Space Station, the multinational crew was likely working through their decision tree, solving one problem at a time until the crisis was over or until they ran out of oxygen.

  I found the certainty of decision trees comforting. One formed in my head almost instantly.

  No good outcomes, but waiting to wash was definitely the wiser choice.

  “Oh man.” I furrowed my brow at my phone. “I forgot I have to get ready for D block science club. No shower for me!”

  I was a terrible actor, but it didn’t matter. He’d already turned around to change into his shorts, and I risked one nervous glance as his towel dropped, and I stepped out in the sunlight, sweating more than when I’d gone in.

  * * *

  ***

  “Catastrophic failure!” Jackson wailed, or something like that, through his snotty tears. I handed him a Kleenex, told him we didn’t know what was happening and we shouldn’t assume the worst. Although assuming the worst was kind of a Jewish tradition. Assuming the worst was how we’d survived for millennia. I didn’t actually know why we shouldn’t assume the worst, but it felt like something someone wiser would say to a child, so I said it.

  It did not comfort him.

  “If their life-support system is suffering complete collapse, how is that not a catastrophic failure?” He sniffled. “They’ve sealed almost every section of the station! Can you check the news again? Is SpaceX preparing a rescue? What’s @RogueNASA saying?”

  “I just checked,” I told him. “Why don’t we work on our rubber-band sonar?” I pointed at the cool science project I’d planned for that hour, but Jackson had no interest, and three other science kids who’d chosen to spend their afternoon inside with me had more interest in Jackson’s meltdown than my perfectly planned project.

  “What if it crashes? What if radioactive compounds explode in the atmosphere?” Jackson’s voice was like a siren, and his tears started the other kids crying, and I wanted to shake the kid and yell at him to get it together. I was the closest thing to an adult in the room, and I needed to either calm him down or get one of the actual adult counselors to help.

  “Do you want to call your moms?” I asked him.

  “They’re lawyers! How can they help?” he yelled in my face, then collapsed back in his chair, weeping.

  “Uh…” I needed to think of something. I hated the uncertainty as much as he did. I pictured Commander Frisch from her Instastory, betraying no worry. What did her face look like now, trapped in a tiny part of the International Space Station with her crew, knowing that millions of people were looking up from the planet below, counting down the minutes until the ISS became her tomb and one of the greatest feats of human engineering, scientific endeavor, and international cooperation died with her. It wasn’t the Tower of Babel; it was a statistically improbable catastrophe that was, nevertheless, not impossible. A problem of physics, not God. Why would Levi have even brought some Torah story into it? And why was I thinking about him right now?

  “They’re working the problem like they’ve been trained,” I told Jackson. “If there’s a solution, they’ll find it.”

  He looked up at me with big, wet eyes and offered this nugget of tween nihilism: “The astronauts are all going to die!”

  “Uh…,” I said again. I was really not great at this, but what did I know about counseling a ten-year-old through the possible death of his heroes?

  “Isn’t it great?” A too-cheery voice cut through the room, surprising Jackson out of his meltdown. All our heads snapped to the doorway, where Levi Klein-Behar stood in sunlit silhouette, a six-foot shadow bursting into full color as he charged into the room. His metal smile beamed at us. “Everyone is going to die! You! Me! Our parents! The astronauts!”

  “Levi?” I wanted to stop him from making this situation worse. Also, to ask him what he was doing in the Craft Cabin.

  “Death is one thing that everyone on Earth has in common,” he said. “It is nothing to be afraid of. It happens to every single person in the world, and no one’s ever come back to complain about it, right? We all do it sometime, and how lucky would these astronauts be if they got to die doing what they loved? If it was my time, I’d want to die while dancing naked in the desert!” The kids giggled nervously, their eyes puffy, but they were curious about this sudden change in the mood of the room. I still gaped at him. He turned to me and winked. “How ’bout you, Josh? How would you want to die?”

  “I…um…” They all looked at me, expectant. Jackson’s lip was still quivering, but he was breathing normally again, sniffling and waiting for my answer. Levi wore a smirk now, and I had to meet it. I forced a smile and drenched my voice in cheer, trying to think of something kids liked. “I guess I’d want to die in an explosion at my cotton-candy factory on Mars?”

  “How about you, Jackson?” Levi asked, leaning toward him like a co-conspirator.

  “I’d want to—” Jackson wiped his nose on his arm, his brow furrowed in thought. Then his face lit up. “I’d want to die because I ate all the pizza in the world and then farted so much it opened a black hole and I fell in!”

  The other kids cackled.

  “I’d poop a nuclear explosion!” Marie, a quiet eleven-year-old girl, added. “And blow up my sisters, too!”

  More laughter. More fart and poop deaths. Levi pulled out some chart paper and decided we’d rank our ways to die, coolest to dullest, and no one brought up the disaster on the ISS again, and pretty soon the hour was over, and it was time for them to go to free swim. They groaned because they wanted to stay and learn about embalming, which Levi promised they could do another day, and when we were alone in the room, I collapsed into a too-small chair, relieved and exhausted and in absolute awe of Levi Klein-Behar.

  “That was amazing.”

  He shrugged. “Distracting ten-year-olds is my one talent.”

  “Oh, you have more talents than that,” I blurted way too quickly and way too loudly. “I mean, like, music and stuff, right?”

  Why did I sound like such an idiot when I talked to him? I had fives in AP Physics and Bio, was going to get a five in Chemistry, too. I was so much smarter than “music and stuff.”

  “I guess,” he said, which was an understatement. The first Friday night of camp, he had played an original acoustic “The Room Where It Happens” parody—“The Shul Where It Happens”—that had every Hamilton fan at camp, which was basically everyone, rolling in the dirt laughing so
hard. An eighth-grade girl peed herself from laughing, and she wasn’t even embarrassed.

  “So was Jackson right?” he asked me. “Is it bad up there?” He looked at the ceiling, but he meant “in space.”

  “It’s not good,” I said. He waited for me to go on, and I went…and went…and went…“The outside of the space station is covered in pipes to keep the solar panels cool, and they’re filled with ammonia gas, which, if it leaks into space, is harmless, but if the leak is inside the space station, high concentrations of ammonia gas can kill everyone on board in just a few minutes. It seems like some space debris flying at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour made multiple impacts with the hull of the station, breaching it and the coolant pipes, which forced the crew to seal most of the ship. Normally, they’d put on the space suits and perform a depressurization for controlled breach egress into a shuttle or pod, but they’ve been cut off from their space suits by the breaches, and the atmospheric ammonia levels are rising. SpaceX is prepping Falcon rockets for a rescue, but the mission window isn’t for at least twelve hours, and the crew might not survive that long. Hull breaches and ammonia leaks are two of the ‘big three’ scenarios that are considered the most catastrophic in space. The third is fire, and, because of the system damage, they can’t confirm there isn’t a fire burning somewhere on the station. Fire on Earth is predictable, but combustion events in space burn in every direction. They can’t even place smoke detectors with one hundred percent accuracy. The air could literally catch fire anywhere and burn up and down and sideways. Also, the CO2 levels in the pod where they’re sealed are going up fast, and they’re trying to fix that system, too, while the NH3 levels are rising, and their venting process risks cutting short their breathable air supply. Managing the chemical composition of the crew environment is one of the most challenging aspects of life in space under optimal circumstances, but in the event of catastrophic system failure, managing O2, CO2, and about a dozen other potential hazards under a severe time limit is the kind of challenge that— Sorry.”

  I noticed his eyes had glazed over. That happened to people when I got excited about atmospheric chemical management. “I—I know…it’s nerdy. I just—it’s really important, actually. Or, like, I think it is? Most people think it’s just weird….”

  “No.” He shook his head. “People with passions are cool.”

  “Literally no one thinks this stuff is cool.”

  “You do.”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure “cool” was how I’d describe it.

  “Anyway, cool is overrated,” he added.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Yeah, neither would I.” He leaned on the edge of the wooden table in the middle of the room, one leg crossed over his knee, and I saw his thigh vanish into the shadow of his shorts, which made my eyes dart up to his face like nervous carp avoiding a predator.

  “We move around so much, I’m always the new kid,” he said. “And this doesn’t help.” He pointed to his rainbow yarmulke. “I’m not Jewish enough for the Jewish kids, too religious for the other queer kids, and too Jewish for everyone else. Also, I genuinely like spending time with my parents.”

  The other queer kids, he’d said. There was a combustion event in my heart. It burned in every direction, sideways and up and down. And down farther. I suddenly hated the treasonous shorts I was wearing.

  “So what are you doing here?” I blurted as I adjusted my legs and leaned forward.

  “Beatrice sent me over,” he said. “Told me she didn’t need me at play rehearsal, and I could either help out in the science club or senior-camper flag football.”

  “Oof, anything to avoid football, right?”

  “Something like that.” He flashed his metal-mouth grin, and until then I never thought braces could glimmer. That was the only word I could think of, though. When his lips parted, his mouth glimmered.

  “What?” I asked, because he was just staring at me.

  “I’m thinking.” He stood and went to the chart paper, tapped my martian-cotton-candy-explosion answer at the absolute bottom of the “cool” list. “What’s your real answer?”

  “About death?” Why did he want to talk about death? Was he some kind of undercover goth? “I don’t know. I try not to think about it. What’s yours?”

  “This was mine,” he said, tapping his answer just below David Sussman’s crushed inside my mecha by the falling corpse of a Kaiju. “I’d want to die dancing naked in the desert.”

  “Why the desert?” I really wanted to ask Why naked? but if I said the word “naked” to him, I felt like I would die then and there in probably the least cool way possible.

  “When my parents were living in Uganda, where there are, like, only a few hundred Jews in this cluster of tiny coffee-farmer towns, we needed a break from all that small-town life, and we went over to Kenya to go on a safari. One night, I had to pee, and I slipped out of the tent and wandered off. The guides had told us to stay close to camp because of lions and stuff, but I wandered farther off anyway—I was fifteen and figured nothing could hurt me—and when I got far enough away, there was nothing but me and the noises of the desert and endless stars.”

  I was tempted to correct him that he was probably in a savanna, not a desert, but I didn’t want to ruin the story.

  “The stars were everywhere, all around me from horizon to horizon. It was like I was bathing in them! So I decided to strip down, like I was in the bath. I stood there, in the desert, totally naked, dancing in circles and waving my arms like I was splashing the stars all around me, and I’d never felt happier in my life. I thought I finally understood what my parents talked about when they talked about God. I even said the Shehecheyanu! You know it?”

  “It’s, like, a prayer…uh…for saying thanks?”

  “Especially whenever we do something amazing for the first time,” he said, then laughed at himself. “Yeah, so I’m saying the Shehecheyanu, and then there’s this noise in the brush right in front of me. I froze. I couldn’t see anything. It could’ve been a lion. I didn’t know what to do, but the stars were still there and so was I, and if it was a lion, there was no way I could escape…so I just started dancing and singing the Shehecheyanu again. I just danced and chanted until the tiny bird that was in the tall grass flew away. Then I put my clothes on and ran back to camp, laughing the whole way.”

  “You could’ve gotten eaten!”

  “But I didn’t! And that moment of not knowing was the most in touch with God I’ve ever felt. I think that’s what faith is, you know? Living with the tension of not knowing what happens next. I’d be totally happy to die dancing in that tension, because I think God is actually in that tension. It’s like dancing with God. Like, God is in a lion as much as he’s in the stars, you know?”

  I nodded, but I didn’t know. I just didn’t want him to stop talking. I had fallen in love with Levi Klein-Behar at some point while he was talking about how he wanted to die.

  “Maybe those astronauts are feeling the same,” he said. “Maybe they’re up there, doing what they love, bathing in the stars, and knowing that they’ve never been closer to God than they are right now, whether they survive or not.”

  Someone who was slicker than me might’ve told him that he didn’t believe in God, but did believe in the laws of attraction. Someone who was more clever than me might’ve come up with a poetic story about death of his own. Someone who was braver might’ve stood up and kissed him right then.

  But I am who I am, so instead, I said, “I have to get ready for tabletop games,” and stood up so fast I nearly passed out.

  “E block doesn’t start for another five minutes,” Levi told me with a puzzled glance at the old-fashioned wall clock.

  I leaned on the table while the blood came back to my head. “I need to make sure all the Settlers pieces are sorted. A few of the kids freak out if they�
�re not.” I started pulling out random boxes, even though none of them were the Settlers of Catan box, just to avoid making eye contact with Levi.

  “Got it.” His voice was kind of quiet, and I knew I’d done something wrong, but I didn’t know what. Was saying “freak out” about the gamer kids ableist? Did I offend him? Or did he think I was running away from his God talk? Was I afraid of God or afraid of him?

  “I guess I could hang out a minute longer,” I tried. “Those kids can live within the tension of a few missing Settlers pieces, right?” I laughed in what I thought was a polite chortle, but which came out more like a snort and which got no reaction from him. I’d totally ruined our thing, and now he thought I was making fun of him. Crap.

  Why couldn’t we just go back to talking about death?

  “I should get to the music hut,” he declared, and I felt like an air lock had just closed between us. “It’s free drumming time, which is exactly as horrific as it sounds.”

  As he brushed past me through the screen door without looking, I felt all the air rush from my lungs. Should I stop him? Should I say something? Decision-tree time.

  No good outcomes.

  I stood frozen on the inside of the screen door, staring after him as I tried to work the problem another way, but he turned back and shouted up the steps, “Hey, find me at the dining hall at dinner? I need to know what happens with the astronauts.”

  “Oh, okay, yeah.” I tried not to cheer like mission control after a successful splashdown. When he’d gone, I sat in the tiny plastic chair again and dropped my head into my hands, wondering what had just happened. Maybe I hadn’t ruined everything by not being spiritual enough for him. Or maybe he was just being polite? Was he curious about the crisis on the International Space Station…or had I just been asked on my first-ever date? Could it be a date if you had to go to the camp dining hall anyway, whether he asked you there or not?