The Lightest Object in the Universe: A Novel

by Eisele, Kimi

  “He’s good,” Dragon said.

  Beatrix nodded. He was good.

  They listened as Reilly Crawford the trash collector transformed into the Red Raven superhero and helped the Council of Elders address the issue of the disgruntled teenagers, who’d been sneaking out of the Settlement to illegally trap animals. They listened as the youths formed their own council, a way to have their grievances heard. They listened as the Red Raven took flight for a full view of the Settlement, his red wings dark against the sky. They listened as Reilly Crawford reemerged, awkward but endearing, from his alter ego’s triumph. They listened as he nervously approached the confident Wren, and finally mustered the courage to ask her to dine with him. They listened as Wren said yes. And they listened to the deep, warm song of the violins as the narrator described the first kiss, at the edge of the boneyard, beneath the circling vultures.

  “Nothing like a good romance,” Finn said when the episode ended.

  “A romance with backbone,” said a woman.

  “And courage,” Finn said. “He always seems to know how to do the right thing.”

  “But, you’ll notice, he rarely acts alone,” the Irishman said.

  “I want to be a raven,” one of the young girls said.

  Beatrix leaned her head on her dear friend Dragon’s shoulder, feeling gratitude amidst the grief.

  As the road inclined, Rosie stood up on the pedals for more power. Sweating through her clothing, she removed the long coat and wound it around the outside of the backpack she’d taken from Ralph. She used trees in the distance as motivating goals. Just get to that one, she told herself. Now that one.

  A gray-green river mirrored the road like a steady hissing serpent. Rosie stopped to refill her water bottle. Maybe it was dirty and unsafe, but what other option did she have?

  She came to a town tucked into the high slopes, and she remembered having passed through it. Tourist shops no longer open for business, shingled homes with their painted white porches. A handful of people walked the sidewalks. She rode past the yellow train station, where Jesús had imitated a train whistle.

  She stopped in front of what once had been a coffee shop and leaned her bike against the window. Two kids rode by on small BMX bikes, then stopped and circled back around. Rosie stiffened.

  “Are you one of those riders?” called one of them. He couldn’t have been older than twelve. “Are you delivering mail?” he said when she didn’t answer.

  Rosie shook her head no, and they rode on.

  She pressed her forehead into the window of the former coffee shop. On the floor were a dozen or more heads of cabbage, five or six unmarked cans, and clear plastic bags filled with something red. She pushed on the door, and it opened. She entered quietly and grabbed two cabbages and three cans. As she was stuffing them into her backpack, the boys on the bikes appeared again.

  “Hey! You’re stealing!” one of them said.

  Rosie hopped on the bike and pedaled away fast, relieved that they did not come after her. She pushed past the fatigue in her legs with a mixture of remorse and resolve. Yes, she was stealing. And now it occurred to her that she had nothing to open the cans with.

  As the sun lowered, the temperature dropped, and Rosie stopped and fished out Ralph’s gloves and hat from the backpack. She thought of the night ahead. If she were cold now, she’d be even colder in a few hours. Just a little bit more and she’d stop. She had yet to come to the overturned semitruck, the one the horse cart had had to squeeze around on the way. If it was still there, maybe she could sleep inside it.

  Ahead, a figure stood at the side of the road, leaning against a tree. She stiffened. A hitchhiker?

  She approached, and the figure remained still. It was not a person, but a tree, with something tied around it. A red-and-white checkered shirt. A dirt road turned off to the right. The wind picked up a loose paper on the ground, held it aloft for a moment, then scuttled it gently toward Rosie’s feet. S.O.S.

  Carson felt as if his bones had melted and his lungs had dissolved, as if the air he breathed could no longer sustain him. If he stood, his body would fold like cloth. His cupped hands could hold neither liquid nor dust. He was a sieve, lying in a cabin in the woods. If he could make it outside, surely the wind would whistle through him. But why should he get up? Everyone he loved was gone, and not a soul in the world knew where he was. Even the crafty coyote had abandoned him.

  He was not feeling sorry for himself. He was simply staring truth in the face. There was no need to pretend anymore. No need to walk anymore. He could surrender his body. He was not his body anyway. His body was a ruined container. The man, Carson Waller, would become history, a story no one would tell. A silent history, he thought, closing his eyes. He imagined himself floating in midair or warm water, weightless and untethered. It was not a bad feeling. He did not feel afraid.

  He heard a sound outside, leaves shifting. The coyote? Then he heard footsteps on the wooden planks of the porch, and a silhouette appeared in the doorway, a woman in a dress with tousled hair. Not Beatrix.

  She moved slowly into the room, covering her mouth and nose. He had probably shat or pissed or vomited, or all three, there in that room, and now someone was finding him, shameful stink pool that he was.

  “Hello,” he whispered.

  The woman jumped and turned back toward the door. The light revealed her to be more girl than woman. Her dress was actually a long coat, and she wore fingerless black gloves. She looked like a character from a bad film about the end times.

  “You probably have a rifle inside that coat,” Carson muttered.

  Because she did not answer him, he was not sure if he had spoken the words aloud or just imagined them. He wanted to tell her to put the metal bucket of water on the stove to boil. Fetching it had nearly killed him this time. But he couldn’t muster the words.

  She leaned toward him, and as the light reached her face, he saw her eyes. One was blue and one was brown, just like June’s old dog. “Roxy,” he said, remembering.

  Rosie froze, startled. Had he said her name? It sounded like he had, but how would he have known? She must have imagined it.

  She covered her mouth and looked down at him. His eyes were open wide, but his body was like a crumpled piece of paper.

  The man whispered something, and Rosie bent down to hear him.

  “Did you see my sign?” he whispered.

  Rosie nodded. And now what was she supposed to do? He was not well, and maybe even contagious. She shuddered and went to the window. The sky was a smoky gray. A wind tilted the trees and brought a spattering of raindrops. The bicycle leaned against the porch where she’d left it, and as much as she wished now she had not turned off the main road, she was grateful not to be riding anymore.

  She’d followed the dirt road and seen the truck, and in it, the body that hadn’t moved. Of course it hadn’t moved. She’d seen the death on him, his eyes sunken, his body siphoned of air. She had assumed he’d been the one who’d made the sign and that she’d been too late.

  The rain came down harder now, and Rosie shivered inside her coat. The man on the cot shifted, the sleeping bag swishing. What if she hadn’t stopped? He would die. He might still.

  Flash had said that you had to do your own good in the world. At this moment, Rosie was quite sure she had not yet done any good in the world. For one thing, she was now a thief. Worse, she had abandoned her abuela there on the ridge at her final hour. How could she have done that? Tears spilled from her eyes.

  After a while, she heard the man breathing heavy, asleep. She looked at him, the hump of his thin body. He will probably die, she thought, slipping off her backpack.

  She brought in an armload of wood from outside and piled more on the porch to keep dry. She arranged the wood in the stove, found some matches, and lit a handful of twigs as kindling. When the flames threatened to die out, she looked for fuel and found a notebook on the table. She tore out some blank sheets, crinkled them up, and added them to th
e fire.

  She rummaged around in the man’s pack and found a can opener along with a bag of rice. She put a few handfuls of the rice in a pot of water and set it to boil.

  She opened a window. Despite the damp and cold, the place needed some air. In the light, she could see dust and dirt on the floors, along with a drying pool of vomit not far from the man’s bed. She summoned her abuela’s strength and found a broom in the closet. She swept the floors, shoving the dirt out the door, then found a rag under the sink, wiped up the vomit, and splashed the whole floor with water from a metal bucket.

  When she was finished cleaning, she pulled a chair up to the table and sat down. There was a candle there, and she lit it. She stared at the flame as the sky outside went dark. The man stayed asleep, his breath slow and constant. The rain thickened into sleet. She slid the notebook into the small puddle of candlelight and flipped it open to a page of handwriting. It was a letter, addressed to Beatrix. Rosie felt something leap inside her chest. Beatrix? She looked at the man lying on the mattress, his arm thrown over his forehead, his skin glossy in the dim light. Beatrix? She began to read.

  The cabin was warm, like a womb, when Carson woke again. The girl had her head down on the table, and her hair was tossed over one of her arms, catching the glimmer of a single candle. He rolled onto his side and saw a small cup of water near him. Had he put it there? Had she? Hearing him stir, the girl lifted her head and came to refill the cup from the bucket. She brought a small glass bottle from the table, opened it, and demonstrated, squeezing a few drops from a dropper in her mouth. She motioned for him to open his mouth. Without saying a word, she blinked. One blue eye, one brown, closing, opening. He opened his mouth, the bitter liquid pooled under his tongue, and he swallowed it. Then she brought him a small bowl and fed him some rice.

  As soon as it was light enough to see inside the cabin, Rosie put on her coat and went outside. She had been holding her bladder all night, afraid to go because of the body that lay in the truck nearby. It was stupid. He was dead. But death was sly and crafty—who knew when it might reach for her? She hobbled into the woods, the muscles in her legs stiff and stinging from the miles of pedaling.

  “Good morning,” the man said when she returned. He was sitting up on the cot.

  Rosie gave him a nod, then rubbed her hands together and pressed them into her cheeks.

  “Cold out there?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  Rosie looked at him, his matted hair, his beard, his warm eyes, his broad forehead. She reached for the notebook, wrote her name at the top of a blank page, and handed it to him.

  “Rosie,” he said with a small smile. “I’m Carson.”

  I know, she said inside.

  He stood up slowly, the filthy sleeping bag falling to the floor like a sigh. He wore only a thin T-shirt and pale-blue boxer shorts, both crusty and discolored with stains. She flinched and turned away.

  “Outhouse,” he said.

  When he returned, she gave him more drops of the tincture and some more rice. With his can opener she broke into a can of green beans. She also opened the jar she’d found in Ralph’s backpack and poured one peach into his bowl and one into hers. They ate, and she smiled at the sweetness.

  By midmorning, Carson felt a little stronger. As though the blood had returned to his veins after a long absence, his bones and muscles could function again, and his mind could think more clearly.

  When he asked Rosie about the drops, she wrote: My grandmother made them from plants.

  “A magic potion,” he said. “I feel so much better. Thank you for feeding me.”

  Rosie nodded.

  “You saw my sign?” he asked again.

  She nodded.

  “Coming from the east or west?”

  East, she wrote.

  “On a bicycle?”

  She nodded.

  “And where are you going?”

  Home.

  He wanted to know more, but he knew to be patient. Girls her age were reserved, particularly with men old enough to be their fathers. Trust had to be earned. His students, the brightest at least, had always withheld at first. He’d be consistent and kind and deliberate, and then, in time, they’d come forth. Whoever she was, this girl was resilient and bright. She was entitled to her privacy. She had followed the road and found the cabin, she had cleaned the floor, she had given him medicine.

  Rosie made the trip to the creek with the bucket. The air was cold, but the sun came through a clearing above, and she took off her coat and leaned up against a large boulder, letting the warmth soak into her skin. There was enough rice in Carson’s sack for another pot, which could feed them both for a day or two more, along with the other two cans and the cabbages. But Rosie had a journey ahead of her. She did not know what Carson had planned, but she doubted his truck had any fuel. She had only the bike, and it would be mostly downhill from there. She did not owe him anything.

  She returned to the cabin and put the rice on to boil.

  That afternoon, Carson steeled himself to deal with Felix’s body. There was no shovel to dig a hole with, and he did not have the strength anyway. He gathered rocks and began to arrange them. A circle was what he wanted, something to hold in the body, at least symbolically.

  It would have been nice if he could have done this sooner, he thought. Before the girl had come. She’d seen Felix, of course. Maybe she thought he had killed him. Maybe he had.

  What was she doing here anyway? A teenaged girl on her own in the mountains? Was she alone? Was she even real? He turned away from the grave and looked back at the cabin. Rosie stood at the window, watching him.

  He moved slowly, his body still weak.

  When she saw what he was doing, Rosie felt glad. She did not like the idea of a dead body in a truck. After a while she went outside, gathered more stones, and brought them to him.

  “I only knew Felix for a few days, though it seemed like we’d been friends for years,” Carson said. “He was smart, quick, adventurous. Not naive. Confident.”

  Rosie stacked large rocks side by side, then placed small stones into crevices. She liked the puzzle-like nature of the work, the pausing, the finding, the filling. Without realizing it, she began to hum the corrido.

  The sound surprised Carson. It had been weeks since he had heard any woman’s voice at all. Hers was deeper than he’d imagined it would be, and lovely. The melody was bouncy and repetitive but also held notes that were solemn.

  When they finished with the grave, Carson looked down at his own body: thin, filthy, and ravaged, but alive. “I need to bathe,” he said.

  At the creek, he removed his clothes and stepped into the water, so cold it bit him. He splashed himself, and in the splashing, he heard laughter. He whirled around, but the girl was not there. The laugh came again. Beatrix. It was her laugh. His heart lifted, buoyant. He moved to deeper water, dipped himself under, and remained submerged, his head freezing. He would live to hear that laugh again. Whatever it took, he would hear it again.

  He went to a large rock and lay down upon it. The sun pierced the trees and poured over his body. Every day another blessing, Ayo used to say. He was probably darting through the streets right this moment, greeting people, laughing, holding up just fine.

  Carson returned to the cabin and suggested Rosie bathe while the sun was still warm. “Go. It’s a whole new life. I’ll stay here.”

  Rosie walked downstream a bit, then stripped off her clothing. Gasping, she quickly dunked herself into the stinging cold. She remembered the lake where she and her abuela had bathed on their way to the Center, how her abuela had reached for her on the way into the water, how warm her abuela’s hand had been.

  At the cabin, Carson was lying on the porch, napping. Rosie stood over him and began her song again, this time with words.

  Carson woke and listened to her sing about the women in skirts, and the man with long arms, and the chocolate that wasn’t
chocolate, and the birds that were not birds. A sharpness coursed throughout his body. Cold? Heat? He couldn’t tell. He remembered Marcy, the look in her eyes when she’d asked him to take her with him. He leaned forward onto his knees to steady himself.

  When she finished singing, Rosie felt empty and numb from the cold and the story. She stood stiffly, her eyes red and frightened.

  Carson reached for her and held her as the light changed and made the trees grow thicker and dark. He remembered the way Jonathan Blue’s eyes had squinted into thin blue lines. He remembered the prairie dog on Blue’s lap. He remembered how he’d felt put off and comforted by the preacher all at once. Blue. This complicated man and his “civilization upgrade.” And now Rosie’s account. The preacher had done himself in. Or had he ascended, after all?

  He held Rosie a little longer, and then it seemed like the thing to do was to walk, to put themselves in gentle, steady motion and let the losses inside them shift and move and find a bearable placement. They went to the dirt road, past the truck, their steps slow and synchronized. The breeze hummed through the pines, and every now and then, branches knocked and creaked. They walked the length of the dirt road to the highway, where Felix’s shirt still hung.

  In the distance, they could see a large, bruise-like cloud. Carson felt a shiver up his legs. As great as Felix’s truck, Daisy, was, she did not have four-wheel drive to navigate slippery roads, even if it was all downhill from here. A breeze picked up, lifting Rosie’s hair and fanning Felix’s shirt against the tree. Carson gestured to the cloud. “When it comes, that will be snow. We need to go soon. We’ll put your bike in the truck, okay?”

  Rosie nodded.

  Once they were inside the truck and moving west down the mountain, Carson told Rosie where he was going and how he’d gotten that far. He told her about Ayo and the railroad and the jungles, and about his trying to capture history right while it was happening so that people could learn from it, so that maybe someday he could teach it. He told her about the people who’d helped him, all that kindness and luck, and about the close calls, and how his time in the cabin was the closest of them all.