by Erika Swyler
“Who fucks somebody with their clothes on?” Louisa had replied.
Nedda didn’t remember a dentist’s smell precisely, and things had changed from when she was little and in the chair at Dr. Lowell’s office. She’d never had a tooth drilled. But she remembered how citrus oil could smell beautiful, and how it could turn your stomach. How two people could make the same thing smell entirely different.
Gloves and burned teeth. Butter and lemon. Solder and ozone. Rum, aloe, rubbing alcohol, and sleep sack. Louisa had loved the smell of dentist. Nedda loved the smell of the ship, of them. To others, they’d smell like burning tooth.
“Louisa, what if I blind you?”
“You won’t.”
Louisa held on until her arms tired, the rum making her loose. Nedda had expected loneliness and knew how to survive it: with books, with work, with curiosity, with learning. She’d not expected the rest.
They would never have children. It had seemed like so little to give up at the time. See an entirely new world, or have a child on a dying one? They’d never have wives or husbands, which hadn’t seemed like a sacrifice either. They were driven people. But they knew one another as no other people ever could. They were wives and husbands and children together.
They were what light reflected.
The Break
She’d seen her father as a little boy, as an old man, and all the people in between, but none of those fathers were him. When sine crossed X, she knew him like she knew home, the cracks in the front porch steps she walked over every day, the creaky spot in the kitchen floor, how the living room smelled like all of them together. She knew him the way you know the smell of chocolate chip cookies in the oven, or the nap of a favorite blanket snuggled against your bare feet.
“It’s okay if you want to talk to him,” Betheen said.
A smooth wall was between them, the same slickness that was around the monkey, around Denny, a layer of time stretched thin. Through it she saw his crumbly fingernails, their rough tips.
“I didn’t see Halley’s Comet. I lied.” She waited for him to say something.
“Why?” He was supposed to know everything, to always have an answer. For why he’d done it. For why she’d lied to him.
“I don’t know.” She wished she could grab his hand and wrench it. “Why don’t you want me to grow up?”
“You should have all the time to do everything you ever want. Time is a good thing, the best thing.”
Everything she ever wanted. Nedda wanted to go to the moon, walk on its craters. She wanted her own space shuttle and to feel what weightlessness was like. She wanted to name new things, and walk somewhere no one else ever had and maybe never would again. She wanted to fall asleep on a lab table while he told her about stars. She wanted to lie on a dock in the sun, catching fish with Denny. She wanted to smell Betheen’s pistachio shortbread in the oven and help make cakes that looked like raindrops of champagne. She wanted to know her brother. Some of those things had happened, some could never happen, some wouldn’t ever happen again. Because of him.
Betheen tugged her back. “Not too close.”
Just because she couldn’t squeeze his hand didn’t mean she couldn’t hurt him. “I want to grow up.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t matter now.
“I think we can stop it,” her mother said. “We’ve rigged an electromagnet. If we time it right, it should be able to disrupt the field.”
His smile was quick. “Good girl, Beth.”
Girl. Like a little thing, a secondary thought. Nedda was a secondary thought to her brother. Crucible was meant to keep her from growing up, but he’d built it because of Michael.
“Theo, it’s the whole town.”
“I know. The whole place is floating, isn’t it? The town is floating. The anomaly is in the water and the wires. Once it got in— I didn’t think. You’d have spotted it earlier, wouldn’t you? You always found and fixed all my mistakes.”
“There weren’t many,” Betheen said. “The magnet is going to pull the machine apart.”
“I know,” he said.
Crucible spit frigid light, making Nedda and Betheen jump back.
“Little Twitch, I need you to listen. You have to be far away when it goes,” he said. “There will be gasses and radiation and I don’t want you and your mom here.”
Part of her had known when she’d first seen him this way, trapped. Part of her had known the moment he’d first said poisonous. She suspected the answer but forced herself to ask, to confirm the hypothesis. “What about you?”
“Don’t you worry about me.”
Betheen interrupted. “The electromagnet is supposed to run in opposition to you, the time you’re in. There should be a pulse, a big one, when you’re … when you’re like you are now. Pete McIntyre has a launch sequencer. We’re using it to run a cycle and start the magnet remotely,” Betheen said.
“The power?”
“Two generators,” she said.
He was going to die. He’d shift again soon and die. But he’d really die too. No return. The room grew colder and Nedda’s toes went numb. They’d pull the magnet into the lab, start the generators, and run the sequencer from the hallway. Then Crucible would break. He would breathe in gas and radiation. Her parents spoke sweetly, looking each other in the eyes.
“Dad?” She wanted to hug him, feel the skips of electrical impulses, light.
“It’s going to be fine, Nedda.” He reached as though feeling for the edges of when he was, where he was. “Denny will be fine. I’m sorry this happened. But I’m not frightened and you shouldn’t be either.”
“But I’ll never see you again.”
“Please don’t worry. It’s already happened, and it’s okay. I promise. Little Twitch, you’re going to be fine and so will I. What did I say we all become? Gas and carbon. Heat and light. I’ll be in the air, I’ll be in the ground. I’ll always be with you.”
“That’s stupid,” she shouted, then wished she hadn’t. Those might be the last words he’d hear her say. But it was stupid.
“It’s not,” he said. “You were with me even before you were born. Everything that would make you was already here, waiting to be you. It’ll be like that, I promise. It’ll be like I’m waiting for you.”
“Will it hurt?”
“No,” he said.
She wanted to believe him.
“Beth, if you can, after …” Clanging drowned his words; Mr. Pete had dropped one of the generators.
“I will,” Betheen said.
“Can you stay for a little while,” he asked, “but leave when I don’t know what’s happening?”
“Of course,” Betheen said.
His face slid away, becoming someone else, somewhen else, a film rewinding. Nedda leaned into Betheen, and was grateful for her sharp hipbones, her wiry arms, her body that had no give.
“Nedda, you ought to wait outside.” Mr. Pete stood in the doorway, the head of the electromagnet on the dolly. He’d turned a funny color. “That— You shouldn’t see this.”
She’d had enough of people saying what she should and should not do. She turned from him, back to Crucible’s spinning, the cold that emanated from it, and her father’s writhing body. “I need to watch.”
“You’re sure?” Betheen asked.
“I have to.”
“She’s fine, Pete.”
They stayed with him through a cycle. His body shrank in on itself, his arms and legs retracting, growing thinner. He grew shorter, younger, fat blossomed on his face. The psoriasis crept up and down his body, and when his face was too difficult to look at, she watched his skin, how it moved, silver and red dancing all over him. His skin had nebulas.
“Mom. He’s going to die.”
Betheen scratched her neck gently, just below her braid. “We’ll be fine, Nedda. It’s not okay right now, but we’ll be fine.”
When he was a baby, he was round and screaming, like a doll, l
ike someone else’s person and not hers.
By her ear, breath tickling the fine hairs, Betheen said, “Here’s a secret. You’ll be stronger. Not at first. You’ll miss him terribly. At first, you’ll walk around and wonder where a piece of your heart went. You’ll think maybe you died. But you didn’t, and you won’t. You’ll learn how to live when you’re hurt, how to work when you feel broken, and how to do better than everyone else even though you’re suffering. All those other girls and boys who have easy lives, who don’t know how to hurt—when they grow up and lose someone, it will stop them. But it won’t stop you, because you’ll know better. And I will be here, and I won’t ever let you go. Not ever. Even when you grow up and don’t need me anymore, I’ll be here, just in case. This is it.” She kissed Nedda’s temple. “Nothing will hurt more than you hurt right now.”
“It isn’t fair.”
“No, it isn’t. But we’ll be okay anyway.”
Okay wasn’t enough. Okay was going to school and having spitballs hit your cheek. Okay was your friend sleeping on your floor because he couldn’t go home. Okay was living your entire life without knowing you had a brother who died before you met him. Okay was always reaching for something you could never touch. A shuttle. The moon. Him. Okay was walking around with your heart in a fist, breathing like you were running out of air. She dug the heels of her palms into her eyes, waiting for the pressure to make colors bloom, waiting for pain.
There was a change in the light, a pop of warmth, a bright burst skittering. The chill in the room receded, their breath no longer fogging.
“Betheen?” His voice was smooth, high.
He was young. Somewhere between Nedda’s age and the age he was supposed to be. He was frightened; his mouth did the same thing hers did when she was scared.
“Betheen, you look—”
“Old,” her mother said. “I know.”
“What happened?”
“You were in an accident.”
It was more than that, but it wasn’t. Nedda tried to look away when he saw her, but couldn’t. The confusion hurt.
“Beth, who is that?”
“This is Nedda Susanne. She’s eleven, and she’s brilliant.”
He didn’t know her. That hurt worse than anything, worse than Betheen said. But he looked at her the way she looked at the moon. Like he was lying on his back and looking at the stars.
“Are you …” he said.
“She’s the smartest girl in her class. She’s skipped a grade already. She’s perfect and she loves you like you made the whole universe.”
“I married you? We have a daughter.” He tried to stand, but fell like a broken branch.
“Yes,” Betheen said.
He laughed, the hard kind of laugh that cramped your belly. “Lucky bastard.”
“Let him see you, Nedda.”
Her father wiped his eyes, searched the floor for his glasses, but gave up. He pulled the skin around one eye, narrowing it to better see. Without his glasses, without his lines, Nedda saw his cheeks looked like hers, and so did his narrow-bridged nose, his thin top lip.
“Am I a good dad?”
“Yes,” she said. Inside her pocket she found the scrap of her mission patch, and kneaded the last bit of the red apple into her thumb. There were other words, but they stuck to the roof of her mouth. She couldn’t hear the room, Crucible, or the sweep of her mother’s hands at her collar; she heard a memory: his voice opening the sky. Pointing to a spot in the black saying, See? Pluto is our far star sailor.
“We need to go soon, Theo.”
He pulled his legs tight to his chest, wrapped his arms around them. One of Nedda’s favorite ways to sit. A stone settled in her gut.
He rubbed near his temple, revealing a reddened plaque where hair didn’t grow, a spot he’d worried at. “Nedda Susanne?”
“Dad?” He wasn’t her father yet, but he would be someday. He would be in an hour, or a minute, sometime after they’d gone.
“This must be strange for you. I don’t know you yet, but you know me.”
“A little.”
“Theo, you don’t stay this way for long, and what comes soon isn’t pretty.”
“You’re perfect,” he said to Nedda, just for her. “If you don’t see me again, if I’m not around, I want you to know that you are perfect. That was the first thing I thought when I saw you.”
Crucible’s legs inched forward, a spinning spider, and her father began to change. Nedda couldn’t watch.
Betheen grabbed her arm, hard enough to bruise, and pulled Nedda from the lab. She was crying, so she closed her eyes and pictured the moon. She pictured seven plumes of smoke in the sky, gas, carbon, light, and heat. Combustion that moved too quickly to hurt.
The hall lights were out, making the sequencer a harsh block of shadow, the cables waiting snakes. Light flowed from the lab—Crucible was leaking time.
The walls shook as Mr. Pete switched on the first generator. He looked out from behind Mitzi’s shadow and shouted, “The other generator is up and running good. All you need to do is let me know when.”
The first generator hooked into the sequencer, providing power. The sequencer hooked into the second generator, which fed the electromagnet. In the end, her mother’s equation was beautiful. A single line in graceful handwriting, the same slanting loops she used to write recipes. Betheen could write Fold egg whites gently and an equation that would tear Crucible apart and kill her father.
“How much time?” Nedda asked.
Betheen took the kitchen timer from her pocket. “Twenty minutes, then we turn it on. We really shouldn’t wait longer.” They could spend it with him, inside. But it would hurt more, wouldn’t it? Would he even know? She leaned against the sequencer, her coat buttons clicking against Mitzi’s metal case. Nedda sat beside her, touching but not.
“I could do it for you,” Mr. Pete said.
“No, you can’t,” Betheen said. “Would you mind waiting in the truck for us?”
He said something about being just outside, and then his footsteps were stones skipping down the hall. If you died in the sky, if you were incinerated, your ashes spread on the wind and you covered the land and the ocean like fog, like the crop dusters that used to fly over Prater. You blew across the sky and for a while, maybe always, you were flying. Maybe you were light.
Betheen hugged Nedda to her. When the time came, she said, “It’s now.”
Her mother loved him. It was in the words.
“I’ll do it,” Nedda said.
She’d flipped the switch before, when the sequencer had stood in Mr. Pete’s yard. Exposure had nearly worn Mitzi’s lettering away, sun bleaching the type. SEQU NC ON was up. It was silver, the kind of switch her dad used when he showed her how to build a circuit, the same kind of switch that ran Crucible.
“You don’t have to,” Betheen said.
“Yes, I do.” Switches were logical: on/off, if/then. If Betheen flipped the switch, then Nedda would blame her. If Betheen flipped the switch, then there would come a time when Nedda had to make a decision and would look to someone else to do it for her. If Nedda flipped the switch, then she would know she could do the hardest possible thing.
He was in pain.
Things that are important are always frightening.
I want you to know that you are perfect.
For the greater good.
The click was quiet, more sensation than sound. Fans whirred inside the sequencer. Red numbers ticked away fractions of seconds, counting down time until the generator ramped and sent a jolt of electricity into the electromagnet—the needle—aimed at Crucible’s heart. If it was big enough, strong enough, it would tear the machine apart. The electromagnet would turn on when the bubble was at its thinnest. There would be a surge, and surges brought sparks, and sparks in rooms full of gasses were bad. Combustion was the boldest chemical reaction. Gas. Carbon. Light.
The sequencer’s metal case was cool against her ear. The inside sounded like
lines of dominos clacking against each other, toppling, Connect Four chips dropped into a frame.
Light pulsed from the lab door.
Arms were around her waist, dragging her down the hallway, down the stairs, away from the heat and rolling light. She was shoved through the brush and branches that covered the door. Whisking, stirring, folding, kneading—little movements done with great repetition across time made strength. A second pair of hands dug under her arms; they smelled like rust and motor oil. Then she was in the middle of the truck’s bench seat, sandwiched between Mr. Pete and her mother.
Someone flipped switches for shuttles; there was always a person to do those things. Someone had flipped a switch for Challenger. Was it worse if you flipped a switch and didn’t know it would kill somebody? Her dad would know the answer. She would be lying on the car hood, peering through a telescope and looking for comets, and he would say that no work that matters was ever without consequence. He would mean it. She wouldn’t lie to make him happy.
She imagined his face—not the little boy, the old man, or the young one who’d said she was perfect. Him.
“Mom, am I going to forget what he looks like?”
“Yes and no,” Betheen said. “Pictures will help.”
Mr. Pete rolled the window down and lit a cigarette. The smoke trailed in ribbons. Streamers. Combustion and oxidation. Ash.
“Where are we headed, Mrs. Papas?”
“I want to see Denny,” Nedda said.
“His mom is with him,” Betheen said. “She needs time alone with Denny, okay?”
She needed time too. Just in case, so the last he saw of her wouldn’t be her running away. “What if she didn’t bring him the coffee berries? What if he doesn’t know?”
“She needs time, Nedda.”
At that moment, her dad was alive in the lab. Denny was stuck in the grove. She was in a truck with her mom and Mr. Pete and she’d done something hard, which was something to be proud of even if she would never be able to tell anyone about it. Nothing had changed yet. When her dad died, when he was gone and she felt it, she wouldn’t really see it either. It would already be done. The light from the explosion would travel from the lab, through the air and into the truck window and then her eyes. It would take time. That distance might as well be a million light years.