At the Edge of the Universe

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “I think so.”

  I cleared my throat. The theory sounded even crazier when I said it out loud. “What happens to those solar systems and worlds when no one’s in them? Time still moves forward in the game, but what players see when they enter them changes depending on their circumstances.”

  “Yeah,” Calvin said. “Now I’m lost.”

  I bit my lip, trying to think of the best way to explain it. “It’s my fault. I’m probably screwing this up.”

  “You’re doing fine.” Calvin smiled.

  “Okay, so part of quantum theory is that until we observe something, it exists in all possible states. That’s why a photon can act as a wave in one instance and a particle in another. It would be a waste of processing power to keep the unused portions of Alien Worlds running perpetually, so when no one is around to see what’s going on, they exist as all possibilities, and then the computer chooses one when someone enters that part of the map, changing to fit the player’s expectations.”

  Calvin stared at me. He hardly blinked. Then he said, “So your theory is that we’re living in a game?”

  Yeah, it definitely sounded crazy, but I couldn’t back down now that I’d put it out there. “Yes. And particle-wave duality, as well as other weird aspects of quantum physics, are shortcuts used by the computer running the simulation.”

  “That’s . . . interesting,” Calvin said.

  “It’s only a theory. One of many.”

  Calvin pursed his lips. “But how does that explain your boyfriend going missing?”

  “Well, that’s not the only weird thing that’s happened,” I said. “There’s Tommy vanishing and Flight 1184 crashing and the universe shrinking—”

  “Wait. The universe is shrinking?”

  I nodded. “A lot.”

  “And you think it’s because we’re living in a simulated world?”

  “Brains in jars,” I said.

  “Brains in jars?”

  “It’s a philosophical thought problem. If a crazy scientist scooped out your brain, kept it alive in a jar, and hooked it up to a computer, feeding it sensory data, your brain would be incapable of telling the difference. You wouldn’t know you were a brain in a jar. The world fed to you by the mad scientist would feel real.”

  Calvin perched on his stool, hugging his knees to his chest. I wished he were a brain in a jar, so I could poke and prod at him and figure out what he was thinking.

  “You’re far more interesting than I expected,” he said after a few moments.

  “You expected me to be boring?”

  “No,” Calvin said, flustered. “It’s just . . . I’m used to hanging out with guys like Trent, whose thoughts exclusively orbit his dick.” He paused. “I like that you think about weird stuff.”

  Now I was flustered, so I changed the subject. “What’s the deal with you and Trent, anyway? He came by the bookstore and warned me you were a pathological liar or something.”

  Calvin’s head drooped again. “We have a complicated history.” When I raised my eyebrows, he said, “Not like that.”

  I wanted to ask him more, but a deep voice echoed up the stairs, calling, “Cal? You home?” followed by heavy footsteps.

  “In my room,” Calvin called back. He grabbed his black hoodie off the floor and pulled it over his head. “My dad,” he whispered.

  “You okay with Chinese tonight?” Mr. Frye said as he lumbered into view, stopping when he saw me. “Oh. Didn’t know you had company.” Calvin’s father was squat and dense, like God had meant for him to be taller but had been forced to squish him into a smaller package. His blond hair—curly like Calvin’s—was thinning on top, and his sunburned face was covered with pale stubble.

  Calvin motioned at me. “Dad, this is Ozzie. Ozzie, my dad.”

  Mr. Frye waved a filthy hand. “You’re welcome to stay for dinner, Ozzie, but I gotta work tonight, so you boys’ll be on your own.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but at least one of my parents probably expects me home to eat.”

  “Sounds nice. Wish I could get Cal to come out of his room for dinner more often.”

  Calvin grinned. “I would if you were ever around.”

  Mr. Frye shook his head. “How about you work two jobs and I’ll stay home and futz around on the computer all night?”

  “Nice try, Dad.”

  Mr. Frye stood in the doorway for another couple of seconds before saying, “Well, it was good meeting you, Ozzie.” He looked pointedly at Calvin. “Maybe you could clean up some tonight? The dishes are out of control.”

  “But if I leave them in the sink a couple more days, they might walk themselves into the dishwasher.”

  “Smart-ass.”

  After Mr. Frye left, Calvin said, “He’s a firefighter. One day on, three days off. He also works the stockroom at Walmart.”

  “Oh. He seems cool.”

  “He’s all right.” Calvin didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He kept wringing them over and over. “He’s had a rough time of it since my mom took off. Said she wasn’t cut out for being a wife or mother.”

  “That sucks.” I wanted to ask him if her leaving was the reason he’d gone dark side, but it wasn’t my business.

  The conversation died. I didn’t know what else to say, and Calvin had this far-off look on his face. The silence grew uncomfortable, and I was about to leave when Calvin said, “So you really think the universe is shrinking?”

  I mumbled “Yeah” and hung my head.

  “I don’t know how we’d go about it, but if you want help looking for Tommy or proving we’re living in a game—a shitty game, by the way—count me in.”

  His offer surprised me. “Why?”

  Calvin glanced at the floor. He fidgeted with the hem of his shorts. “I had a crush on you in tenth grade. Did you know that?”

  “Me? What?”

  “I did,” he said. “You were cute and shy, and I fantasized about you asking me to sit with you and your friends at lunch, and we’d joke and laugh, and you’d hold my hand under the table.” He flicked his eyes at me and then back at the floor. “Stupid, right?”

  I hadn’t suspected Calvin Frye had a thing for me. I hadn’t suspected he liked guys. And he was definitely cute, but . . . “I love Tommy.”

  “I know,” Calvin said. “That’s why I want to help you.”

  I checked the time on my phone, trying to cover how uncomfortable Calvin’s admission had made me. “I should get going.”

  Calvin stood as I gathered my papers and stuffed them into my backpack. “I’m around all break if you want to work on the project some more. Or on other stuff.”

  We walked downstairs. The house felt even lonelier now that I knew Calvin was going to be spending the rest of the holidays alone. I stopped at the door and said, “Lua’s band is playing another show at a/s/l on New Year’s Eve. Wanna go?”

  A smile split Calvin’s face, and it was beautiful.

  “Definitely. And I can make you a fake ID, by the way.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure. It’s easy.”

  “Thanks.” I lingered at the door another second before turning to leave.

  “Hey, Ozzie?” Calvin called after me.

  “What?”

  “If we’re living in a game, that means none of this is real, right?”

  “I guess. Why?”

  “No reason. See you Sunday.”

  1,998,000,000 LY

  THE PART-TIME HOLIDAY HELP MRS. PETRIDIS had hired didn’t know Harry Potter from Langston Hughes. And one of them—usually Chad—stopped me every ten seconds to ask for help locating a book because apparently the alphabet confounded the hell out of him.

  I hadn’t seen Mrs. Ross come in, but I was at a table eating my lunch when she approached, carrying a stack of GED prep books. She stopped when she saw me. Her eyes widened slightly, and she looked like she didn’t know whether to run or pretend like I was invisible.

  “You don’t have to leav
e,” I said. “I know you don’t remember Tommy.”

  Mrs. Ross didn’t respond, but she didn’t run away either. She set her books on the table farthest from me and sat facing the window.

  After Tommy disappeared, I’d scoured my journals for traces of him. But instead of my history with Tommy, I’d found one without him. Instead of me approaching Lua in sixth grade at Tommy’s urging, we’d met because she’d stolen five dollars from me and had gotten into a fight when I’d called her out on it, earning us both detention. According to my journals, I had taken Sonia Jackson to the eighth-grade Halloween dance. And afterward we’d gone with a group of her friends to see the newest movie in the Dr. Deadeyes franchise where, in the dark of the theater, Sonia had held my hand and kissed me.

  Tommy had slipped out of some parts of my history easily. Parties we’d attended together became parties I’d gone to with Lua or Dustin or alone. Dates Tommy had taken me on had simply never happened. I’d even apparently dated a boy named Erik Bode in tenth grade whom I’d met through Dustin. It hadn’t lasted, because Erik’s father, who hadn’t known Erik was bi, freaked when he caught us making out on Erik’s bedroom floor and transferred Erik to military school.

  But other events, pieces of my history in which Tommy had been tightly intertwined, made less sense without him. The first weekend after I got my car, we drove to Orlando for no other reason than that we could. I got us lost in the city and we stopped in front of a phone company to figure out where we were and how to get home. Without warning, Tommy had run inside the building and returned less than a minute later with an armful of Orlando phone books.

  We’d laughed about it the whole drive back to Cloud Lake.

  Without Tommy, I’d taken the trip alone. For no reason that I had explained in my journal, I’d driven to Orlando, stolen a stack of phone books, and driven home.

  My journals were filled with a hundred memories like that. Events that lost all meaning without him.

  If my memories had been replaced with ones that made sense, I might have eventually come to believe I’d dreamed him. But whoever or whatever had erased Tommy had left behind too many inconsistencies that defied explanation. Like the phone books. That’s what convinced me I hadn’t imagined Tommy.

  Even if I tried to explain all that to Mrs. Ross, I doubted she’d believe me. Instead, I watched her while I ate my lunch and wondered what had filled the Tommy gaps in her life. Tommy had blamed himself for his mother’s situation. He’d believed if she’d never gotten pregnant with him, she wouldn’t have married and stayed with an asshole like Carl Ross, and she would have finished high school and gone to college. I knew from when I’d called the police on the Fourth of July that she didn’t have any children, and that she was still married to Mr. Ross—and the faded bruises on the backs of her arms were evidence enough he was still an abusive prick—but why had she dropped out of high school if not to have Tommy? Who or what, if not Tommy, had kept her from leaving her husband?

  I doubted she would have responded favorably to me asking, so I kept my questions to myself.

  Twenty minutes remained of my lunch break, but I overheard Chad arguing at the register with a customer, so I gathered my trash and trudged back into the war zone.

  Hours later, at closing time, Mrs. Ross was still working. I approached her table and cleared my throat. She flinched but didn’t look up.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that we’re closing.”

  “What time is it?” she mumbled.

  “Nine.”

  Mrs. Ross’s eyes flew wide. “Nine?” She rubbed her eyes with the balls of her hands. “Do you know anything about binomial equations? I swear it must’ve been the devil who invented algebra.”

  “Actually, algebra’s roots go all the way back to the ancient Babylonians.”

  “Either way, anyone who says they love math has got to be soft-headed.”

  I knocked my skull with my knuckles. “Ten on Mohs hardness scale.”

  Mrs. Ross laughed and her cheeks glowed, and I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them—and how much she reminded me of Tommy—until that moment.

  “You’re a weird young man.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me. I suck at math, but if you need help with the writing sections, I’m your guy.”

  Mrs. Ross opened her mouth to speak, but whatever she’d been about to say was lost when Mrs. Petridis yelled at me from the back room to lock the doors and bring her the till to count.

  “I should get home,” Mrs. Ross said. She scooted back her chair and stood. “My husband will be wondering about his dinner.”

  I wanted to stop her. To ask her about Tommy and find out what her life had been like without him and dig through her memories for any stray scraps that might remain. Even if my friends and family had forgotten Tommy, I couldn’t believe his own mother had. But I didn’t want to scare her away again.

  So I said, “FOIL.”

  Mrs. Ross stopped at the door. “What?”

  “FOIL,” I said again. “It’s a mnemonic for solving binomial equations.” It was also the only thing I remembered from Mrs. Alley’s freshman algebra class. “First, outside, inside, last. You multiply the terms in that order. FOIL.”

  Mrs. Ross stared at me like I’d spoken Akkadian, but a hint of a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “FOIL,” she said, nodded, and then slipped out the door.

  1,780,000,030 LY

  WARREN’S GOING-AWAY PARTY FELT MORE like a “go away” party. Mom, Dad, Renny, and I sat at the breakfast nook wearing party hats and eating gyros and mushy saganaki from the Greek place up the road. I’d positioned myself between my parents to act as a buffer, and every time they looked like they were headed for a fight, I changed the subject. I refused to let them ruin one of our last nights with Renny.

  He wasn’t leaving for four more days—January second—but this was the only time Renny, Mom, Dad, and I could coordinate our schedules.

  “Where’s training, again?” I asked right after Dad remarked about the dryness of his gyro, an obvious knock at Mom’s decision not to cook Renny’s last meal at home.

  “Fort Benning,” Renny answered with his mouth full.

  “Fun.”

  “I seriously doubt that,” Dad said. “Your drill sergeants won’t let you sleep until noon.”

  Mom had barely touched her dinner, because she was waiting for the éclair pie in the fridge—which was the only reason we ordered takeout from the Greek place. Seriously, the pie was amazing.

  “Maybe the army will give you some direction,” Mom said.

  I’d spent the last few days waiting for one of my parents to beg Renny not to leave. He would have listened to them where he ignored me. But my mother and father were incapable of cooperating, not even to save their eldest son from making a huge mistake.

  “Basic’s ten weeks, then infantry AIT for five weeks. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a few days’ leave to come home before my first posting.”

  I didn’t understand how Renny could treat this so casually. Like he was leaving for a gambling cruise to the Bahamas instead of the army.

  “Listen to your drill instructors,” Mom said. “And try to make friends with the other recruits.”

  “Christ, Mom. It’s the army, not kindergarten.”

  “I know that, Ozzie,” Mom snapped.

  “Do you?” I could barely stand to look at my parents. Their indifference had killed my appetite. Even for éclair pie. “Look at us. We’re wearing party hats, celebrating Renny’s idiotic decision to run away from his problems instead of tying him to a chair to make him stay.”

  Warren set his fork down and folded his hands in his lap. We were talking about him but not to him, and I’d been in his position before. Sitting in the cafeteria while the other kids talked about me and the plane crash like I couldn’t hear them. It was a shitty thing to do, but right then I cared less about Renny’s feelings than about possibly saving his life.

  Dad clenched h
is jaw. His already too-thin lips became barely more than pink face slits. “Warren’s certainly not the first of our sons to run from his problems. We haven’t forgotten about your little misadventure.”

  “Misadventure?” I said. “You mean the one where the plane crashed and exploded?”

  Mom tagged in. “Your brother’s an adult, Ozzie. Your father and I may not agree with his choices, but they’re his to make.” She glanced at Dad. “If it turns out Renny’s made a mistake, he’ll just have to live with the consequences like the rest of us.”

  “Real nice, Kat,” Dad said. “Are you actually bringing that up now?”

  “I didn’t sleep with one of my students’ parents.”

  “Wait,” I said. “What?”

  But they’d taken up their weapons again and dragged me and Renny into the trenches with them. “No,” Dad said. “Just someone young enough to be one of my students.”

  Mom slammed her fork on her plate, chipping the ceramic edge. “At least I waited until our marriage was over, Daniel.”

  Dad snorted. “Keep acting as if our marriage hasn’t been over for years. You checked out long before I did.”

  “I’m done.” Mom stood and marched upstairs, slamming her bedroom door behind her.

  Dad hung his head, pushing strips of fallen lamb around his plate with his fork.

  When I couldn’t take the silence anymore, I said, “You cheated on Mom?”

  “It’s complicated, Ozzie.”

  “Either you did or did not have sex with another woman while still married to my mother. It’s really not that complicated.”

  Dad wouldn’t look me in the eyes. “Maybe you’ll understand better when you’re my age. Or maybe you won’t.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin and draped it over the remains of his dinner like a shroud. “People drift apart, and sometimes they don’t notice soon enough to fix it.”

  “That’s your excuse?” I said.

  Dad left the table and walked outside to the back patio.

  “Still think I’m crazy for wanting to get the hell out of here?” Renny said.