by Erika Swyler
There was a slick sort of tingling, then nothing. Her finger slipped, gliding past the monkey’s face without touching it, and the animal remained frozen, as though she hadn’t threatened to blind it. A drip of water splashed down from the powerline overhead, it too just missing the monkey. The water seemed funny, thick looking, almost opalescent. She grabbed for the monkey’s tail and her fingers slid again, skimming over an invisible surface like soap suds, a slippery bubble. The air around it looked strange too, almost like it was bent. She rubbed her hands together, but they weren’t slimy. Normal skin, sweat, and the stain from the apple on her drawing.
“What the heck?” she whispered.
Denny and Mr. Pete talked about the accident. “Blam,” Denny said. She couldn’t pinpoint the moment she’d heard the explosion, or what it had sounded like. She’d heard herself say the C word, screaming, crying, then silence. It could have been blam, but that sounded too small. She kicked the truck, startling herself.
Nedda tried to dig under the monkey with the dipstick—one, two, three—then with her fingers—another four, five, six, for a larger sample size. Better data. There was no getting under it, or even touching the patch of water beneath it. Something around the monkey had a bouncy pushback, like pressing magnets together when the poles weren’t aligned: resistance, and strong.
“Are you all right in there, Nedda?”
“Fine.” She would be fine, if he left her be. Why wouldn’t it move?
“You’d best head home.” Mr. Pete said. “I’d call your mother and let her know you’re here, but my phone’s out. I guess the lines must be overloaded, or something shorted out somewhere. It keeps going in and out. The power’s on the fritz too. Don’t worry your folks. Get home. It’s looking like a storm out.”
“Okay, thank you,” she said, though she didn’t know what she was thanking him for.
“Tell that mother of yours I said hello. My birthday’s coming up and I’m thinking about a cake this year.” Mr. Pete turned red like a strawberry every time Betheen brought the car in for repair.
The long way home brought them past Ginty’s Bait & Tackle and the Bird’s Eye Diner, where Denny could get them free ice cream sodas because his father had loaned Ellery Rees money when the diner flooded. The parking lot was full and a news van was there.
“Did you get it? Is it in your bag?”
“I couldn’t get it,” she said. “It’s not moving and I can’t touch it, but I don’t think it’s dead.”
“How do you know if you can’t touch it?” He hopped over a tree trunk Hurricane Bob had knocked down.
“There’s kind of a bubble around it, almost oily, but not. I don’t know. You know freeze frames in movies? It kind of looks like that to me. I want to check on it tomorrow.”
“Betcha a gator eats it.”
It was too cold for gators. She knew the monkey was supposed to be dangerous, but it was sweet with those round eyes, like her pony. You were supposed to love stuff like that. Cute was a defense mechanism; it made people more open to loving you. She knew that with the certainty of a girl who had never been and never would be cute.
“My dad got me a baby gator head last night.”
“Cool. Can I see it?”
“I’ll bring it tomorrow. Wait for me by the fire door after school if you want to check on the monkey.”
They walked by the shell of Mauna Kea Motor Inn. A sign on the sagging A-frame showed rates for rooms that hadn’t been rented since 1974. The S in rooms dangled drunkenly from one end.
“Okay. Can I see what your dad’s working on?”
“He’s not done yet, and he uses radioactive stuff, so it’s dangerous.” It was what her father said all the time. “It has these giant leg things that move around like the teacups at Disney.” She stuck out her arms, swinging them. “It’s made of metal, maybe steel, and there’s a lot of glass too. You know the mag lev track he built us?”
“Huh?”
“That magnetized rail thing he made for our Matchbox cars? He took it apart and used it for part of the track the machine’s legs spin around on.”
When her dad had brought her to the college to teach her how to plate the inside of mason jars with silver, he’d shown her the machine and let her push the legs once; they’d floated around the track with barely a touch. “There’s a door in the middle, and it’s big enough a person could crawl in, but there’s nothing in there yet. He wouldn’t let me go in it either.”
She’d asked her dad what was supposed to go inside, and he’d said, “Any number of things, I hope.” Which was annoying. Then he’d shown her how to make Sterno out of the antacids he kept in his desk. The flame was bright and blue and it made her laugh that you could make fire from something that was supposed to stop heartburn.
They stopped at the painted rail fence that marked Haverstone House’s yard. Denny lingered, throwing rocks at the Victorian mess. Easter’s only landmarked house was red, orange, green, and made her eyes want to puke.
“Hey, does the sky look weird to you?” he asked.
There might be something off about it. Maybe it was a little grayer than usual, a little yellow too, but she didn’t want to think about why. It might be remnants of the shuttle, of the astronauts. It was probably a storm like Mr. Pete said. “Nope.”
“Huh. Okay. I still don’t feel like going home. Last time I failed a test it was no TV for two weeks.”
“Why’d you fake your mom’s signature, anyway?”
“I don’t know. It was dumb, but it seemed easier at the time.”
“I could help you if you wanted.”
“Wouldn’t matter. I still wouldn’t get it. I don’t mind not getting it, but that’s what bugs Pop.”
“Yeah.” She threw a rock as hard as she could, imagining the side of the house was Tonya’s face. It landed loudly, a chip of red paint falling off the shingle, which for some reason cracked Denny up. For a second the hole in her closed and it was almost as good as knocking Tonya’s teeth out.
“We should probably go,” Denny said when he finally stopped laughing.
“I guess.” She’d wanted home right after it happened, but home also meant hundreds of sugar roses, icing stink, sitting in her room, and thinking about smoke trails.
“I want to go to the grove later, if you feel like coming. Maybe you can bring the baby alligator head.”
“I’ll ask.” Betheen wouldn’t want her to on a school night. Her dad wouldn’t either, because he’d kept her up last night. And something bad had happened, so they’d have to sit and talk, until everybody agreed on the right amount of upset to be.
They walked to the turnoff for their houses. Her insides started humming again and they hummed wrong. She needed to light flash paper on fire, or read something, or throw more rocks. Anything.
“Hey, can I see the patch again?” Denny looked at it for a long time, turning it around and around again before giving it back. “It’s awesome. I wish I could draw stuff like that. I bet they would have loved it.”
Then he turned and walked to his house.
She wasn’t crying, no matter what. Crying would only make the anxious buzz inside her worse.
Dilation and Paradox
Sweet palmetto fruit, easy climbing, crunchy-juicy bugs in the moss. Wet hands. Damp claws. Hunger, hunger, hunger. Burning belly pit. Leap to the tree above the sharp grass. Wait. Sit. Run. Dart to the wheel of the hard, cold beast, where the heavy fruit sometimes falls, roll into the shade. Scramble, scramble.
The primate brain doesn’t rest, never rests. Its thoughts put bees’ wings to shame. Its heart beats as fast, or should beat so. But its pulse is trapped, its thoughts suspended. It moves forward, mid-dart, intent on grabbing a plump grub that squirms and writhes in the wet corner of the truck bed.
The wriggling, twisting grub will fill it up until later, when it can dig its fingers into good, sweet fruit, and lick the juice from its fur. Lick its hands, wet. Wet from the water. Cold and thick and
wet, strange water.
The grub is gone. Snatched away hours before by a mockingbird that zipped between stocky palmetto trunks. It doesn’t know. It didn’t see. In its space, the grub is there, fresh and fat, waiting to be eaten.
It is reaching, stretching, yearning. The sun is different. Light is different. Thick, heavy like water. The grub is gone. Two children have come and gone, poked and prodded at its ears (the softness and size of which it is proud; they are better than its sisters’ ears, the best by far), its tail, its eyes—though it did not see. It would have bitten them right smart with its pricker-sharp teeth. Fine teeth.
Ribbons of yellow, brown, and blue course into penny-round eyes; screams of color that mean movement, light. Light and food and smell and sound, all of it. It stares, transfixed. It does not know beauty, but for a second that lasts half the night, the world around it is a flower and rain at once. A flower that is raining. For a second lasting half a night, it watches and forgets that it is hungry, that it has others in the trees waiting (brothers, cousins, the great scarred mother) for palmetto fruit and grubs, for little fingers to pick the nits from soft fur.
The longest time it has forgotten hunger was a stretch of two days when it slipped through a hole in a storehouse. Its claws had been good against bitter rind, its teeth made to pierce. It had chewed, drunk down, and gorged on oranges until its belly rounded and it was too full to run when the box it was in was kicked. Those two days were its most desperate, when hunger was replaced by gluttonous need. Eat everything so no one else could get it. Eat everything in case there would never be food again. Eat everything because there were other mouths, other teeth, other claws, and hunger rendered them savage.
The second turned half a night that it forgets hunger (the world careening all around it in frantic blurs it can’t discern) is peaceful. It resumes the search for the long-gone grub, unaware that it is reaching, stretching, yearning, but will never touch.
1986: Entropy
Nedda pressed her face into the crevice where her father’s arm met his chest. She was too tall to curl up on him anymore, but she tried to burrow deeper. His graph-paper-checked shirt was better than anything.
“You liked Judy Resnik a lot, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
Judy Resnik was an engineer. Judy Resnik was shy, but she did what she wanted anyway. She smiled with her teeth in pictures. She was fearless. Or not, maybe not. “No.”
“Okay, but you might feel better if you did.” His arms tightened around her and she felt him wince. His knuckles were swollen, hands hot, but he patted her back gently. She should let him go or get him aspirin. She wanted to wail, but she saw the lab table underneath his bookshelf, the peg board with all his tools. Crying in a lab didn’t feel right. If you broke something or made a mistake, you could get mad, but sad didn’t fit. So she talked.
“She had one hundred forty-five hours in orbit and helped design Discovery’s arm. She was an electrical engineer.” It was like opening a closet door—everything fell out. “Judy Resnik played piano and had a picture of Tom Selleck in her locker.” Mr. Pete had a bank of lockers from NASA in his house and she could fit inside them. It was good to be small in an orbiter because there was no extra room in them. Mid-mission, Judy Resnik had held up a sign that said HI DAD. Nedda loved her dad too. She told him about Challenger’s insulation, the felt that made it lighter, about how much it could haul, about ceramic tiles. His hand stilled when she stopped talking, like he knew when she was empty.
“That’s an awful lot. Do you feel better?”
“I guess.” But she didn’t. She pulled away and climbed onto the lab table. She wished she’d brought a quilt. “Can’t we just blow something up?”
He took down the small metal box filled with flash paper they’d made over the summer. He let her light as many as she wanted, holding each sheet out with a pair of tongs. The flame was bright and felt like everything, like explosions, like Jimmy La Morte, like Tonya’s stupid face.
When the room got smoky he tried to open the window, only to pull back in pain.
“You’re having a bad hand day.”
“More of a bad everything day. It’ll pass.”
“Are they getting worse?” His silence was answer enough. “Is there anything that makes them better?”
“Not at the moment, but there will be soon. That’s not for you to worry about. Dads get old and fall apart. It’s what we do.”
“I don’t want you to fall apart.”
“Good news. I don’t either, and I don’t plan to. But let’s talk about something else. What’s my Little Twitch been up to?”
The name settled on her like a hug. She was his Little Twitch because she gnawed through pencils, bounced her feet when nervous, and chewed her lip. Because it felt good. Because moving made thoughts work better.
She could tell him about the C word, and the weird color of the sky. The monkey. But things happened if you talked to your parents about wild animals that might or might not be dead. Things like animal control and disposal. The monkey was hers and Denny’s and it was good that way, something they could keep and figure out, just them. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Does the machine at work have a name yet?”
“It’s called Crucible.”
She knew the word from Johnny Tremain. The machine hadn’t seemed like something you’d use to melt metal. She folded her legs on the table and sat on her feet. Staying like that long enough would make them go numb; then they’d flare back to life with buzzing pain. Maybe that’s what her dad’s hands were like. “Are you going to melt stuff in it?”
“Not precisely. Think of it as a speed machine. I’m speeding up and slowing down entropy. Have we talked about entropy? Heat loss? I’m explaining this badly, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” she said. Honesty was important in science.
He paced the room. She bet he taught classes like this, arms waving as he walked in front of rapt students, stopping when something was important. “Let’s say I have a bowl of marbles, half red, half white. Red on one side of the bowl, white on the other. Now, you come along and shake up the bowl. Do those marbles stay divided or do they get mixed up?”
“They mix.”
“Right. Entropy is you, shaking up the bowl, that progression of things. Entropy is how things move from order to disorder. It’s also one way of thinking about and measuring time.”
“Oh.”
“Are you with me?”
She tugged at the end of her braid. She didn’t want to say no, but she didn’t want to lie.
“Try this. Think about how you get hot when you run. No. A better example—stove coils.” His arms stayed carefully away from his sides, hands touching only air. “The heat that comes off the coils is energy. It’s the same energy that powers the stove. Outlet to plug, through the wires, to the stove circuits, to the coils. The coils heat up, spending the energy. Once it’s heat, the energy is big, wide, and disorganized like the marbles you shook up. It’s hard, pretty much impossible, to put that energy back how it started. So entropy is moving from that electricity in the system to the heat that’s gone out into the air, off the stove coil.” He stopped. “Did I make it worse?”
“No?”
“Crucible arranges things. Specifically, it arranges energy. It can disorganize it faster to get a lot of heat from something all at once, instead of a little at a time. It can also organize things. If I can stop something, a system, from getting disorganized, if I can keep it perfect, it’s a little like stopping time in the system.”
“Why?”
“Okay, back to organization.”
“No.” She cut him off before he could start in on marbles. “Why would you want to stop time?”
“Ah. Better question.” He sat, letting her look down on his hair, the wiry curled mop, thick as his beard and streaked with white. It looked like steel wool. “You’re growing up too f
ast, Little Twitch. Maybe I want to keep you with me longer.” He smiled, but it was tight, square. “What if you could stop all the wear on things like bridges? Or make food that lasts twice as long before it goes rotten? A doctor could stop joints from breaking down.”
“You want to use it on your hands.”
“It might eventually help someone like me. I’m looking for a contained area of effect. And I’m also looking for a patent, so everyone will know you’re the smartest daughter of the smartest man in the world.” That smile was a good one.
“Have you tried it?”
“The last test shorted out the lab, so it’s not quite right yet.”
Crucible’s door had looked like the hatch on an Apollo capsule, right down to the hinges. She’d wanted to crawl inside. It was stupid to send grown men into space when a girl would be a better fit.
“What happens to them now? The astronauts? Not their bodies, I know that already. I mean who they were.”
“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “No one does. That’s part of why people like me and you ask questions and build things. Finding answers to smaller questions gets us closer to answering bigger things.”
That didn’t help and she told him so.
“I think what’s left is our thoughts. They’re impulses, signals that bounce back and forth inside our heads, like the energy we talked about earlier. Maybe when we’re gone what’s left are these signals and impulses, traveling across the universe as heat and light.” His shoe tapped out a familiar, comforting rhythm on the floor.
Nedda’s foot mimicked his, and this too was a little like a hug. “Do you think they’re still out there?”
“They might be.”
“Okay.” She helped him put away his notebooks, sliding a thin journal onto a shelf.
Betheen’s voice echoed down the laundry chute. “Theo? The mixer won’t start. Can you flip the breaker?”
Her parents were happiest with stairs and a closed door between them. The laundry chute ran between Theo’s lab and the kitchen above, and they used it like a soup-can telephone. Her father yelled up, her mother called down, and Nedda checked the electrical box, running her fingers over fuse labels. If one was blown, he wouldn’t be able to replace it today anyway. KIT. OV & OUT. The fuse was fine and the breaker hadn’t tripped. She told her father and he shouted up the chute.