The Lightest Object in the Universe: A Novel

by Eisele, Kimi

  Maybe this is what the end of the world felt like, he thought. Like waking up. He recalled those first few weeks after the power went out, the stunned quality of his days. How he’d sunk into a kind of somnambulism: staring out the window, foraging, wandering the streets looking for Ayo, that buoy who’d kept him afloat. Thank God for Ayo. And now Carson was halfway across the state of Pennsylvania with an unlikely companion. Who was his buoy now?

  He shivered and looked up at the tree beside the pool. Red maple, probably, as he could see small buds silhouetted against the dusk. In a few weeks, this tree would be a scarlet blaze in the sun. He had no idea what came next for him, but he’d just had a bath, and his body was close to clean, and that was its own kind of miracle.

  Later, they revived the fire. Carson gave Jimmy the last of the macaroni. Jimmy split the sausage between them.

  Afterward, Jimmy pushed the hot coals around with a stick. “Got any marshmallows?” he said. Jimmy let the stick catch on fire for a moment, then scratched it against the concrete, making marks. He held a flashlight over the markings. “My hobo nickname,” he said. He’d drawn a smooth-edged cube with legs and a baseball cap, and two short lines as eyes. He’d labeled it Marshmallow Man. He held out the stick for Carson. “Do yours.”

  Carson studied the charcoal tip, his mind blank. He felt a familiar burden. To mark one’s name was a request to be remembered, was it not? A notation of one’s presence. Kilroy was here. He understood the impulse, but in this moment he wasn’t sure he had anything to prove.

  A low thunder rumbled, and the sky began to sprinkle rain. They watched it fall for a while, then went inside.

  Carson unrolled his sleeping bag and stretched out, listening to the gentle tap of raindrops on the roof. His feet, awakened by the pool water, throbbed from the miles.

  Jimmy arranged a blanket on one of the benches. “I had this other idea for a game once. Secrets. The objective was to figure out everyone’s secrets. There’d be a lot of danger: You’d be stumbling into affairs, murders, thefts. You’d have to maneuver into seedy motel rooms and basements and through other people’s heads, trying to decipher the secrets.”

  Carson stared at the ceiling. “Maybe your avatar could lead people to a room that would enable you to hear all their secrets, really loud.”

  “You mean like, ‘No one knows it, but I still suck my thumb!’ or ‘I eat my boogers and actually like them!’”

  Carson laughed out loud. “But not all jokes. How about, ‘I stole my colleague’s work and published it as my own.’”

  “That’s harsh,” Jimmy said. “Or ‘I’m really in love with my wife’s sister.’”

  “Aw,” Carson said. “Sounds like an awful place.”

  “Yeah, that could be a tough room to go in,” Jimmy said.

  Carson was silent for a little while and then aired his own secret. “I never liked being an administrator. I stayed because our livelihood depended on it, or the livelihood we somehow convinced ourselves we wanted. And then my wife died. She had told me many times to leave the job. But I was too afraid to.” Carson felt the itchy sting of regret beneath his Adam’s apple. He heard Jimmy breathing and felt grateful for silence.

  But after a few minutes, Jimmy spoke. “My ma died in the Olympia earthquake. We weren’t all that near the epicenter, but her building was old. I was at the store when it happened. She got pinned beneath a steel support beam. We waited five hours before any help came, but they couldn’t get her out. She was just stuck there, and there was so much blood. Somehow, I managed to reach around the steel beam to touch her. I could touch her, at least. I took off my jacket and tried to cover her with it to keep her warm. And I watched her face change—her eyes just got dim. She didn’t have anything left. I reached over, and I just pressed my jacket against her mouth until she stopped . . . until she stopped suffering.”

  Carson made a sound that wasn’t exactly a word. Then he sat up and looked out at the darkness. “An act of love,” he said. He pictured June’s mouth, her thin pink lips at the rim of the teacup she drank from, both so fragile and delicate. He peeled off his sleeping bag and went outside.

  The rain had stopped, and the night was filled with cricket-song. A distant frog repeated itself. How could anyone judge when a life was complete? He looked up at a patch of clear sky, a dozen or more stars there, many of them dead. When there was a lull in the symphony of frogs and crickets, he returned inside.

  Sometime later, as Carson was settling into sleep, he heard Jimmy say, “I wish I had an orange.”

  Carson thought of Beatrix, her love of them. “The fruit of hope,” he said.

  “A very happy color.”

  Carson’s mind flashed to the walls of orange in the abandoned building that Jairo had shown him, that loud chaos before the darkness. “Once upon a time,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Jimmy said.

  “Just plant some orange trees, will you?” Carson said.

  At dawn, Carson woke to the chatter of birds. He crawled out of his bag and went outside. Jimmy’s drawing appeared clear and dark. Marshmallow Man. There really was a resemblance.

  Carson picked up the stick and dabbed it into the cooled coals. He scratched a horizon line on the concrete, and the crisscross of train tracks reaching into it. Where the tracks ended, he colored in a half hemisphere of sun, four rays bursting from it. In the best grade-school cursive he could muster, he wrote Professor below the drawing.

  He quietly packed up his things, then wrote a note for Jimmy.

  Marshmallow Man,

  Spilled secrets = forgiveness. The world needs your orchards. Best of luck. Be safe.

  —Professor

  He retrieved a protein bar from his pack and left it with the note under Jimmy’s ball cap.

  Carson peered down the stretch of railroad, looking east, then west. He conjured a train: the approaching rumble, the shift in the rails, the crescendo of metal on metal. He longed for speed, to get lost in the blur, to become the train itself and plunge himself into the future. He stepped onto the tracks and began to walk.

  Rosie turned over the square of woven yarn Beatrix had given her and tried to find the loose end.

  “Un ojo de dios,” her abuela said, dividing up a batch of tortillas and wrapping each stack in a towel. “They’re Huichol.”

  “Wee-what?” Rosie said.

  “Wee-choal. Huichol. Your father was Huichol—indigenous, from Jalisco.”

  “Oh,” Rosie said, rolling her eyes. “I didn’t know him.”

  “When a child is born, the father begins the eye at the center, and for each year of the child’s life, he adds more yarn. It is said to protect the child.” Abuela pointed to the God’s eye. “He made you one like that when you were a baby.”

  Rosie held the God’s eye up close to her face and examined it. “He did? Where is it now?”

  “Oh, mi’ja, I don’t know.”

  Mi’ja. Her abuela called her this, but it wasn’t really accurate. Rosie was her nieta, not her hija. Rosie was hija only to her mother, whom she hadn’t seen since she was eight, because that’s when her mother had died. A car accident. The body in the coffin didn’t look anything like her mother. The cheekbones were crooked, and she was too pale, except for the bruise coming through the bad makeup. Who could afford to dress up the dead?

  It occurred to her then that her father, whom she had never met, had probably been dead for a long time. So that even if the so-called God’s eye he’d made for her existed somewhere, it would be skimpy—not because he just didn’t bother to wind the yard around but because who could make a God’s eye when they were dead?

  Her abuela patted one of the bundles of tortillas. “Take these up to Beatrix, okay?”

  Rosie tossed the God’s eye on her bed and went upstairs.

  Beatrix was sitting on the couch. She had a ruler out and was drawing something on a notepad. She lit up when she saw Rosie. “Tortillas, what a treat. Thank you.”

  She hel
d up the notepad. “Pretty soon, we’ll have eggs. I’m trying to draw up a plan for the chicken coop now.”

  “Cool,” Rosie said, sitting in the rocking chair. Outside, a breeze swayed the plum tree. “Do you know what ‘prosy’ means? As in, the ‘winds were prosy.’”

  “The winds were prosy?”

  “It’s from a poem. Emily Dickinson.”

  “Oh,” Beatrix said. “‘Prosy.’ I think like dull or common.”

  “The winds were common,” Rosie said. That worked.

  She stood up and went to look at the dozen or more posters that hung on the wall. “Where did you get all these?” Rosie asked.

  “Hank liked to keep them and put them up,” Beatrix said. “‘A record of the resistance,’ he used to say.”

  Some of the posters announced specific marches and rallies. Others were just images or proclamations. Planets and doves and stylized crops and clenched fists—lots of red and big bold lettering. With her index finger, Rosie traced the wing of one of the monarch butterflies in a poster calling for the protection of immigrants and asked, “How did you get into all of that?”

  “Activism?”

  “Yeah,” Rosie said.

  Beatrix set down the notepad. “My aunt Vera. She lived near some orange groves in Southern Cal. There were lots of migrant workers there, mostly all from Mexico. Anytime we ate an orange, aunt Vera always said, ‘Thank you, Guadalupe,’ or ‘Thank you, Julio.’ Or Marisol or Diego or Fernanda or Juan Carlos. Many names, many workers. She didn’t really know them, but she used to make a point of driving by where they lived so I could see their trailers, their families, their lives.”

  “Cool,” Rosie said. She meant it, but she also felt a little strange. Maybe if her mom had lived, they would have been picking oranges, too.

  “There were some kids that lived next door to Vera that I sometimes played with,” Beatrix continued. “The Butlers. One day the boy, Lenny, showed me a flattened penny and said we could go make more of them. I wasn’t allowed to cross the street that separated the neighborhood from the orange groves, but we went anyway, me and Lenny and Lenny’s little sister. I can still remember the smell of the groves—soil and irrigation water and a sweetness. We got to the train tracks and laid out our pennies, and then this other boy came from the other side. He was about our age. He said something to us in Spanish, but I didn’t know Spanish back then. He saw our pennies and was nodding like he knew what we were doing. But we couldn’t really communicate with him.”

  Rosie bit her lip, hoping the story wasn’t about to turn tragic.

  “After a while, someone called out to him,” Beatrix said. “I saw the pickers in the groves, and he had to go back to work.”

  “What about the train?” Rosie said, holding her breath. “No one got hit, did they?”

  “Oh God, no,” Beatrix said. “The train just came and flattened our pennies. But no—no one got hit.”

  “Phew,” Rosie said, wondering what the big deal was. She took Beatrix’s notebook from the table and, looking at her design, started in on a new sketch.

  “So that was the catalyst,” Beatrix said.

  Rosie was confused. “You got pennies, and that Mexican kid didn’t?”

  Beatrix nodded. “Yeah, that. Exactly. He had to go work. We got to play.”

  “Oh,” Rosie said.

  “I was on one side of the tracks, and that kid was on the other,” Beatrix said. Her face got sad. “I saw that so clearly.”

  Rosie nodded. It made sense then, and she realized at that point which side of the tracks she’d have been on, most likely, and that caused a weird gripping feeling in her throat.

  “Afterwards, when I told my aunt Vera about it, she said, ‘That boy has dreams just like you. Maybe they’re different dreams, but no matter—they’re dreams.’ I always remembered that.”

  Rosie nodded but didn’t say anything. She kept working on the drawing. What good was a dream now? she wondered.

  After a little while, she turned the notebook around and set it back on the table. “How about this?”

  Beatrix leaned over and looked at the drawing. “Oh my God,” she said. “I didn’t know you could draw, Rosie. It’s perfect. It’s a perfect chicken coop.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Carson followed the rails through a town—Altoona, was it?—past brick Italianate buildings with rows of long windows, a white domed roof, a bell tower. People were out selling food, hauling buckets of water, making trades. Women sat knitting on a park bench. One man dragged a dead deer across the road. Full of morning motivation, Carson didn’t want to stop.

  He headed for a ridge in the distance, pulled by the evergreens. The moleskin had taken care of the blister for now, and his gait was steady and strong. Making good time, he continued along the ridgeline, thick with the dark of pine, fir, and hemlock, and the brightness of new maple and oak. Below, a series of reservoirs reflected the gray-blue sky. Ahead, the ridge made a dramatic curve, and soon he noticed a parallel set of tracks a few hundred feet across the valley. From his jacket, he pulled out the postcard he’d taken from the gift-shop rack. “Horseshoe Curve,” he said, thrilled by the match and by the feat itself: how men could cut into the side of a mountain, turn track into sinews, mirror a landscape.

  At the apex, he stopped and looked back over the land. Soon he would leave the Northeast, the terrain he knew so well: fireflies, hemlocks, the singsong call of the eastern towhee: Drink your tea! How lucky he was to see this, he reminded himself. How lucky he was to be alive.

  Late in the afternoon, his path cut through hilly terrain. In places, the earth butted up against a high cement wall that paralleled the tracks. Large, loose letters painted purple and gold seemed to pop from its surface. HOw dO yOU mAkE lOvE lAst? Painted near the letters were bubbles, the same bubbles—or so it seemed—as those he’d seen on the walls in the carriage house, that scroll of history. The same artist?

  He wondered about Jairo, if he was cycling through the streets, if he was surviving, if he had delivered the letters. He remembered the resiliency of youth.

  He found a rock on the ground and used it to scratch his moniker into the wall. Not as good as spray paint, but something. The Professor was here. Proof. He read again the swirling words nearby: How do you make love last?

  The first time June asked him to help her die, he ignored her. He was bathing her, and he continued the sponge bath without speaking, circling the washcloth around her neck, underneath her arms, over her belly. He focused on the creases of her joints, smoothed the cloth over the curve of her back. At first, he had not liked those baths. They signaled her debility, her decline, the coming truth. But he began to accept them as one small act he could perform to make her comfortable. An intimacy in movement. Dipping the cloth in fresh warm water, gently pushing June forward, running the cloth over her back, up to her neck, behind the spiral of her ears. It became a meditation on her body, on love.

  “You’re Mary Magdalene. I’m Jesus,” she had said once, when he had reached her feet.

  “So I’m the whore and you’re the saint?” he’d said, and they’d laughed.

  But during that other sponge bath, there were no jokes. Just his own relentless monologue, blatantly ignoring what she’d just asked him to do.

  “So today, Martín gets sent to me again,” he said. “He started a skateboarding movement through the hallways. I wish I’d seen it. He slammed into Mrs. Chase. Took her out, all the way down. She was furious. The counselors have had it with him. The vice principal can’t stand him. So they send him to me.”

  He rinsed the cloth and made one final steady circle around her neck. “Don’t you feel a million times better?” he asked, helping her out of the tub. He wrapped a dry towel around her and pulled a gown over her head. It fell, like water, over her frail body. She looked old, too old. She looked like she was dying. She was dying.

  “So he shuffles in. He’s got that smirk that he always does. Kind of like this,” he said. He pres
sed his lips together and pushed them to the right side of his face for just a moment.

  “Carson,” June interrupted.

  “Are you cold? Here, let’s get you into the bed.”

  “Just sit with me,” June said, squeezing his hand.

  Carson sat and stroked her hair. He almost had to clamp his mouth shut. He wanted to fill the room with words, spill them across the floor, the bed, her pillow, to black out what she had asked.

  A few days later, she asked again.

  “How can you ask me to do that? I cannot.”

  “Carson,” she said. “I am dying. What difference does it make?”

  He looked at her thin, sick body, the translucent flesh over her bones, the darkness around her eyes. “What difference does it make?” he said, sternly. “Are you kidding me? How can you even ask that?” He turned away from her, angry. When he turned back, she looked small and terrified, like a wet cat.

  Beatrix held a plank of wood steady as Finn pounded in the final nail. “That should do it,” he said. They’d spent the morning putting together the chicken coop from old doors Beatrix had found in the shed and some chicken wire Finn had donated from the garden. It wasn’t an exact model of Rosie’s drawing, but suitable and sturdy enough to keep the hens safe.

  “This is perfect,” Beatrix said. “When we have more materials, we can add an egg house.”

  “You know where to find me,” Finn said, holding up the hammer. He smiled. “So I guess that means you’re sticking around, Beatrix?”

  “I guess so, yeah,” she said. It hadn’t really been a decision she’d made as much as fallen into. She missed Hank and Dolores, but more and more it seemed that Dragon was right, that heading off to look for them might be a suicide mission, that it was safer just to stay put here, where she had shelter, food, community.

  “Good,” Finn said. “We like you here.”

  Beatrix smiled. It felt good to be wanted.

  She followed Finn out front, where Dragon and Flash were hunched over an old boom box. As Finn hurried off, late for a meeting, Beatrix crouched to get a better look.