At the Edge of the Universe

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  Since I wasn’t leaving home to learn how to kill people with my bare hands, my parents hadn’t expended as much thought or money on my presents. Mom bought me a gift certificate to the mall, and Dad got me a new wallet, inside of which he’d slipped a couple hundred dollars. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed by my haul, but my disappointment fled when Renny gave me his gift. It broke my heart and put it back together.

  He waited until our parents had retreated to opposite ends of the house before telling me to follow him to his room, where he disappeared into his closet and dug through piles of dirty laundry to retrieve my mystery present.

  “Here.” Warren handed me a flat rectangle wrapped in baby-shower wrapping paper.

  “Cute,” I said. “I almost don’t want to open it.”

  “Trust me; you do.” Renny was grinning, and I couldn’t begin to guess what he’d gotten me. Usually he bought me a book I inevitably exchanged for one I actually wanted, but the size, sharp edges, and weight gave away that it wasn’t a book.

  I tore the paper, peeling it back. That ripping sound was the sound of Christmas, and I hadn’t realized until that moment how much I’d missed it.

  But then I saw Warren’s gift, and I nearly dropped it.

  “Well?” Renny asked.

  I stared at him for a moment, my mouth agape. Then I stared at the present. A framed colored-ink sketch of Tommy sitting on the beach, his back to the water. His gold-speckled eyes, his crooked smile, his round nose. He sat in the sand with his knees pulled to his chest. Behind him, tangerine and violet fingers spread like an open hand against the sky and outlined Tommy like a full-body halo.

  “Renny? How?” He didn’t remember Tommy, and no pictures of Tommy existed. The drawing wasn’t exact, but it was so clearly Tommy.

  “Don’t be mad,” he said. “But I read your journal on your computer to find descriptions of Tommy.” When I didn’t flay Renny for breaking into my computer—again—he said, “I copied a bunch of the stuff you wrote about him and gave it to Emilia. She’s seriously badass, right?”

  I wanted to murder Warren a little for invading my privacy, but how could I when he’d given me back Tommy?

  When Tommy had vanished, he’d disappeared from every photo and poorly lit phone video we’d recorded. He’d even been erased from my journals, which I’d had to read to learn how my life without Tommy had unfolded, and I’d spent countless long nights rewriting my memories—the way I remembered them—so Tommy would never fade.

  I hugged my brother, pinned his arms to his side so he couldn’t even hug me back. His head barely reached my chin.

  “So, you like it?”

  When I let Renny go, I touched the drawing, tracing Tommy’s strong jaw. “I love it, Renny,” I said. “But I thought you didn’t believe me?”

  Renny offered a halfhearted shrug. “I’ve spent years masquerading online as a female half-elven priestess named Dvāra. Who the hell am I to judge?” He motioned at the drawing with his chin. “And, hey, at least your imaginary boyfriend is good-looking.”

  “Thank you, Renny.”

  “Don’t mention it. Now get out so I can tear shit up on my sweet new laptop.”

  I turned to leave but stopped at the door. “Warren, I don’t want you to go.”

  I expected him to make a joke or call me stupid. But he said, “Don’t worry, Ozzie, I’ll come back.”

  “You’d better,” I said. “But just to be safe, if you see a rocket equipped with a saddle, run far, far away.”

  Renny laughed. “You are so weird.”

  2,000,081,000 LY

  TWO DAYS AFTER CHRISTMAS I stood in the shower thinking about the Salem witch trials.

  Sophomore year my American history teacher, Mrs. Barnes, taught us the story of Giles Corey, who’d been accused of witchcraft. When Corey refused to renounce Satan and admit he’d cavorted with black-magic demons, the self-righteous mob subjected him to pressing in an effort to force the “truth” from him.

  Pressing was a barbaric method of execution in which increasingly heavy rocks were loaded on the accused’s chest until they pled guilty to their crime or suffocated to death. The French called it peine forte et dure—hard and forceful punishment. Mrs. Barnes, with her limited imagination, tried to describe the process of being pressed to death. Of the air being driven from Corey’s lungs by the immovable weight balanced atop his chest. The panic as he struggled to draw a breath and realized his chest and lungs lacked the strength. The parched, dry-mouthed gasps as his defiant but futile efforts earned him barely a wisp of air—enough to keep him alive, though few would call it living. And then, another stone pushing Giles Corey’s soul inches closer to the infinite void beyond.

  According to Mrs. Barnes, Giles Corey took two days to die. I hadn’t thought about him since we’d completed the unit on the Salem witch trials. Back then he was little more than the answer to an exam question that, once bubbled in, became irrelevant in my world. But standing in the shower, thinking about my life—about Tommy and Lua and my parents and Renny and even Calvin Frye—I remembered poor Giles Corey.

  Tommy was gone, and I had no idea how to find him; Lua was preparing to launch into her glorious new future; my only hope of escaping Cloud Lake rested in the hands of faceless admissions officers scattered across the country, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted to go; my brother was days from marching toward danger when he should have been running from it; my parents’ marriage was irredeemably broken; the universe was shrinking; and the only person I thought might understand my problems sought relief from his own unknown-to-me problems by cutting himself.

  Despite my efforts, my life had become a hard and forceful punishment. Troubles rose from the quarry of my mind—a metric ton of failure and fear—and stacked atop my chest, each worry heavier than the last. A stone for my parents, a stone for college, a stone for Tommy, a stone for Calvin and Lua and the shrinking universe. I stood in the shower, just me and Giles Corey, buried under all those stones, struggling to breathe.

  Except, I refused to quit. I was determined to find Tommy and leave Cloud Lake, I would not allow Lua and I to drift apart, Warren was going to survive the military and come home, and my parents’ divorce would not destroy our family. Those stones crushed me, and I fought for every inhalation, but they were not going to kill me. Not if I didn’t let them.

  Giles Corey remained brave until the end. He said to his executioners what I stood in the shower and said to life: More weight.

  • • •

  Mom had left early for the office, and I hadn’t heard Dad come home the night before, but their constant fighting had polluted the house. The echoes of their anger remained, and I needed a break from it before it permanently seeped into my bones.

  Lua was busy rehearsing with the band for her show at a/s/l on New Year’s Eve and didn’t have time to hang out, and Dustin’s parents had dragged him to upstate New York for their annual guilt trip to visit his grandparents, which left Calvin Frye as my only viable option. If I could’ve hung out with anyone else, I would have. I’d texted him under the pretense of working on our physics project, half expecting him to not reply, but he’d messaged me his address and invited me over.

  Calvin lived in a cookie-cutter subdivision filled with rows of identical townhouses nestled so closely together they looked like dominoes set up to be knocked over. Almost nothing distinguished one from the other, and I drove past Calvin’s unit twice before finding it. I parked in the empty driveway and sat in my car debating whether to stay or bail.

  In the span of six months my boyfriend had vanished from his home and from the minds of everyone who knew him, I’d tried to run away to find him and had nearly died in a plane crash, and the universe was shrinking. Spending time with Calvin meant the possibility of inviting his problems into my life, but I couldn’t carry the weight of my own alone anymore, and I thought maybe Calvin was desperate enough for a friend that we could bear them together.

  I
made up my mind, grabbed my backpack, and walked toward his house.

  Calvin answered the door wearing swim trunks and a tank top. I’d never seen him out of his jeans-and-hoodie uniform. It was like he’d molted. His skin was pasty white, but his arms—which were lined with scabs and scars—and legs were braids of taut, wiry muscle. I wasn’t a wrestling fan, but I found it difficult in that moment not to imagine him in his tight spandex uniform.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Calvin said when he stood aside to let me in. “It’s just me and my dad, and we both hate cleaning.”

  The inside of the townhouse wasn’t exactly filthy, but no sane person would have called it clean—half-empty cups stood on the coffee table, and heaps of unfolded laundry lay on the kitchen table. Lua’s house was messy too, but where the Novak house felt lived in, Calvin’s felt neglected.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Want something to drink? I could make coffee.”

  My brain reminded me I hadn’t slept well the last few days, and I nodded. “That sounds great, actually.”

  I hung around the kitchen while Calvin brewed a pot of coffee in a dirty machine that looked older than my mother—definitely older than her boyfriend. A mountain of dirty dishes rose out of the sink, threatening to topple, and I kept my arms at my sides because the one time I touched the counter, my hand came away sticky.

  Armed with plastic tumblers of black coffee—all the mugs were dirty—Calvin led me upstairs to his room.

  I’m not sure how I’d expected Calvin’s bedroom to be decorated. Maybe like a cross between Renny’s room—without the comic books and action figures—and Tommy’s—which had been more of a closet, with a mattress on the floor and his belongings piled in a corner—but with black walls and depressing poems or song lyrics framed and hung for all to see. The reality was something of a letdown. The walls were flat white and his twin bed sat perpendicular to the far wall, a nightstand on one side. A clean desk stood in front of the window, with a rolling stool to sit on. And nothing else. Calvin’s room was spartan, ascetic. No trinkets or posters or anything to indicate his hobbies or dreams, which was still depressing but in a different way.

  “Did you just move in?” I asked, trying to make a joke.

  Calvin shook his head. “Possessions are distractions.”

  “Are you a Buddhist or something?”

  “Or something.” He sat on the stool. “You said you wanted to work on our project?”

  I had said that, and it was partly true. We needed to make some progress on our roller coaster to show Ms. Fuentes when we returned from Christmas break. Besides, I still wasn’t certain I should discuss my problems with Calvin. I’d been worried about inviting his troubles into my life, but maybe he had enough issues without me burdening him with my own.

  “Yeah.” I dug the crumpled pages I’d worked on out of my backpack and handed them over.

  Calvin studied them, nodding as he traced the lines with his fingers. “These are good.” He stopped at a barrel roll I’d added and said, “I’m not sure this will work. Let’s test it.” He grabbed his laptop and wheeled to the bed, where he popped it open and started working. A few minutes later he turned the laptop toward me to show off a 3-D wire-frame replica of our roller coaster.

  “Whoa!”

  “It’s an open-source animation software with a sophisticated physics engine that can accurately simulate the real-world conditions of our coaster.” Calvin clicked the touchpad, and we watched as the wire-frame car—complete with little wire-frame people—shot up the first hill and proceeded to fly through the loops and turns. When it reached my addition, the car broke away from the track and careened into empty space.

  “See,” Calvin said. “The cars are entering your roll too fast. Since we don’t have time to design brakes, maybe we should find a better spot to include it.”

  We worked for the next hour, rearranging the track, experimenting with different configurations. It took some rejiggering, but we finally squeezed my barrel roll into the ride without killing the passengers. Though, based on the information provided by Calvin’s program, our coaster still exceeded safe speeds. The cars remained on the track, but the theoretical g-forces could cause sensitive passengers to black out. Ms. Fuentes would definitely ding us for a car full of unconscious imaginary riders.

  I stood and stretched my arms over my head. “This is tough. I’m pretty sure Fuentes is a sadist.”

  “We’ll solve it,” Calvin said.

  I pointed at the corkscrew on the screen and said, “Removing part of this would reduce the speed.”

  Calvin shook his head. “We’ll never get an A taking the safe route.”

  “I thought you didn’t care.”

  “I don’t.” He kicked off, spinning on his stool.

  The thing was, I didn’t believe him. His Fortress of Apathy felt manufactured.

  “What happened to you, anyway?” I asked.

  “Come again?”

  “You used to have a boner for school and homework, and now you’re kinda limp.”

  Calvin stopped spinning. His shoulders slumped like I’d flipped a switch and shut him off. I prepared to change the subject, but he said, “When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stood on the moon, they looked at Earth and realized our wars and petty issues were pointless. Experiences like that change people. They realize the things they believed mattered are actually inconsequential. That they are inconsequential.”

  “Is that what you think? That we don’t matter?”

  Instead of answering, he said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Only if you agree to answer one first.” Calvin nodded, which I took as agreement. “Why were you cutting yourself? And don’t give me that bullshit about your amygdala again.”

  Calvin licked his dry lips. He touched his arm absently, ran his finger over one of the scabs. “Feelings are intangible,” he said. “You can’t see them, can’t touch them. You can hurt and no one would know. But physical pain is real. You can see blood and broken bones. It’s simple in a way feelings are not, and cutting makes the abstract pain of feelings substantial.”

  “But it’s messed up,” I said. “You get that, right? It’s seriously dangerous, and what if you cut too deep?”

  “I won’t.”

  “And I’m just supposed to believe you?”

  “Yes.”

  Only, I didn’t believe him, and I wasn’t going to give up trying to convince him not to cut himself anymore, but I didn’t want to push him too hard when we barely knew each other. So I said, “All right. For now.”

  “My turn,” Calvin said. “Why were you on the plane that crashed?”

  I liked that he said “crashed” instead of some stupid euphemism. “I already told you: I was going to find Tommy.”

  “The boyfriend who vanished?”

  “We only agreed to one question.”

  Calvin nudged me with his bare foot. “You got to ask more than one.”

  Wasn’t talking about Tommy why I’d wanted to go to his house in the first place? I hadn’t even needed to maneuver him into the conversation. Calvin wanted to know. But I hesitated. Not just because Calvin had basically admitted he cut himself because he was burdened by emotional pain too big to cope with, but because we were starting to get to know each other, and I didn’t want him to judge me. For some reason, his opinion mattered more than I’d expected it to.

  But I needed a confidant as much as Calvin seemingly needed to cut himself.

  “July third, Tommy was my boyfriend. July fourth, he ceased to exist. And not like he died or ran away; he just vanished and no one remembers him other than me.”

  “How is that possible?” Calvin asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “Got any theories?”

  “Yeah. I doubt you’d understand.”

  “Try me.”

  I stared into Calvin’s eyes, looking for some indication of his motives. Was I merely an oddity to st
udy, or something more? But his eyes, his face, gave nothing away.

  Then he said, “I don’t have anyone to talk to either.” And that simple statement changed everything. He’d seen through my bullshit story about wanting to work on our project right to the truth of why I’d called, and he was still there; he hadn’t kicked me out. That had to count for something.

  “Remember Fuentes’s lesson on particle-wave duality?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” I rubbed my hands together, trying to organize my thoughts. I’d never said any of this out loud to anyone that mattered—my shrinks didn’t count—and I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed to until the words came pouring out. “So we know that photons can act as either particles or waves depending on observation. That video Fuentes showed us about the double-slit experiment proved photons act as particles when no one’s watching, and as waves when they are.”

  “Did you hear about the scientists in Australia who took the experiment further?” Calvin asked.

  “No.”

  “They ran tests using helium atoms proving that not only are objects affected by observation, but that observation can cause them to transmit information backward through time to change their behavior in the past.”

  Yeah, Calvin was definitely smarter than me. I’d read a few books on quantum physics, though little had made sense, but Calvin seemed to actually understand it.

  “Anyway,” I said. “So we know this stuff, right? But we don’t know why atoms act this way.”

  “There are theories,” Calvin said.

  “Well, my theory is that particle-wave duality is a shortcut.”

  “A shortcut for what?”

  “Have you ever played Alien Worlds: Kill ’Em All?”

  “No,” Calvin said. “But I’ve heard of it. It’s an MMORPG, right?”

  I nodded. “My brother’s a fanatic. The game is made up of hundreds of planets, divided into different solar systems. At any given moment, there are thousands of players exploring those worlds, killing the aliens they find. But they can’t be everywhere all the time. Still with me?”