The Freak Observer

by Blythe Woolston

  Preliminary thoughts on the Freak Observer:

  I found a picture when I Googled “Freak Observer.”

  Visualization of the problem is the first step.

  I learned that the very first day of physics. Step 1: “Visualize”

  Everything has been simplified to a purple cereal bowl sitting on the table of time and space. Inside the big bowl are other, tinier bowls. Each little bowl is a universe.

  In a little blue bowl, there is a tiny Earth. The little blue cereal bowl is our visible universe.

  There are many little naked brains floating in the big purple bowl. They look like little tan walnuts, the brains do. Some are curled like chicks inside the shells of little bowls, but others are just “out there” in nothing. Those little brains floating all alone are the Freak Observers.

  Their job is to observe what we do not.

  It must be frightening for the Freak Observer. It just pops into existence because it is hard for nature to make a whole universe. It is easier to create bits and pieces—a boot, a planet, a naked brain floating around in nothingness. It’s just there, and it is conscious, so it observes and it remembers and it tries so hard to understand.

  . . .

  I wonder if Mr. Banacek thought much about Freak Observers before he wrote down the words and put the slip of paper in the extra-credit jar.

  Honestly, this is not an ordinary physics problem.

  “I need to find out . . .” I have no idea how to finish that sentence.

  I wonder what Mr. Banacek thinks the right answer is.

  Wondering what other people think is a dead end.

  Even if they tell you, you can never be sure.

  Especially, maybe, if they tell you.

  Lies happen.

  . . .

  “Take care, Loa,” says the bus driver.

  I swear, if I hear that shit one more time, I will not be responsible for my actions.

  I know how to take care.

  I can wash dishes, pull out slivers, sharpen a chainsaw, thaw out frozen pipes, pack a lunch, mop floors, serve five hot plates to a table, get poop stains out of little boy’s underwear, and sterilize a nasogastric tube.

  What do you want me to take care of?

  Shall I stop the glaciers from melting?

  How about malaria? For, like fifty cents, I can keep a family in Africa from dying of malaria.

  If I get knocked around with a toilet plunger, does that mean somebody else doesn’t? OK. It’s a deal. I’m your girl.

  I’ll take care of it.

  . . .

  I trip up the stairs on the way to first period.

  My stuff flies out of my bag and ricochets up, down, and sideway. Pens, calculator, idiotic index cards required for English: Kablooee! The stairs are crowded between classes. There I am, on my hands and knees. Nobody stops. Nobody bumps into me. Nobody even laughs. Nobody steps on my stuff. Nobody steps on my hands as I grab for my stuff and try to put things back in the bag.

  I’m not invisible.

  People just don’t want to look at me.

  A couple of my teachers won’t call on me.

  People don’t want to see me anymore.

  I used to be Corey’s friend, and that was cool, but now I’m that dead girl’s friend, and that is not cool. People used to smile and say, “Hey!” but now I’m like a pile of guts on the highway. Sure they see me, but they have places to go, and it would be weird and sick to stop and say, “What’s up?”

  . . .

  Mr. Banacek brought an orrery to physics class this morning. It’s like a clockwork model of the solar system. There are little metal spheres on little wire arms, and when you turn a little knob, the spheres travel through orbits. It’s a gear-driven wonder that almost works most of the time. It needs a little push now and then to keep the solar system moving.

  I love it.

  It’s pure beauty.

  . . .

  Mr. Banacek collects stuff about space.

  He told us about himself the first day of class.

  When he was a kid, he watched Apollo rocket launches on TV—and Star Trek. He told us about how the stuff on Star Trek was so futuristic for the time, like automatic doors. They had to have some guy pull the doors out of the way when they made the show. Now the doors at the grocery store slide back just like the ones in Star Trek but for real. And those weird little communicators? They made them out of saltshakers. There was no such thing as a cell phone.

  We are living in the future. Except space travel didn’t really work out, and the closest thing to an alien is the almost invisible traces that might be a fossil of a bacteria found on a meteorite in Antarctica.

  The future: not quite as advertised.

  So now Mr. Banacek has an antique orrery and a scraggly gray ponytail and teaches high school physics. He may also get dressed like a Klingon and pretend to eat worms while he watches the Sci-Fi channel. He didn’t confess to anything like that, though.

  He brought in his scrapbooks about the Apollo missions that first day. He started them when he was a kid. There are no cute coordinating papers or stickers, just page after page of newspaper clippings and pictures torn out of magazines stuck in place with yellow tape. I flipped one open, and there was The Bony Guy.

  It was a political cartoon. The Bony Guy was standing by a smoking rocket. He was wearing a space suit and was holding the helmet under his arm. He was grinning, because The Bony Guy is always grinning.

  “Did you forget me?” asked The Bony Guy, “I’ve been on every trip.”

  Mr. Banacek saw me looking at the page.

  He told me three Apollo astronauts died, burned during a test on the launchpad. They were going to the moon. They burned up instead.

  “I thought about that,” he said, pointing at The Bony Guy. “I thought about that cartoon when we lost the shuttles—Challenger and Columbia. And I realized it would never stop us. Fear is not enough to stop us.”

  Then he made the conversation bigger, turned it into a mini-lecture to the class.

  Another Apollo mission, 13, almost failed, but the astronauts were able to save themselves. They knew the math, so they figured out the way home. And they had duct tape, so they could make some creative repairs.

  The class perked up its ears at the mention of duct tape. Everyone understands duct tape. Shit, you can earn a scholarship by making a prom dress out of duct tape. Most of our lives are stuck together with duct tape. Rip your jeans? Duct tape to the rescue. Want to commit a crime? Bring duct tape. You can use it to tie people up— and muffle their screams. Gash your leg with an ax? Use duct tape for a heavy-duty bandage.

  Astronauts used duct tape to fix the moon buggy too. They patched that sucker up just like it was a beater car.

  Once upon a time, Mr. Banacek wanted to go to the moon. Now he’s in a classroom trying to get us to remember things that happened before we were born. He wants us to be amazed by duct tape and ingenuity. Or maybe he just wants to remember when he was amazed.

  My family used to work like an orrery. We would have got a prize in a science fair, our gears turned so smoothly and all the parts fit together so perfectly. Asta was in the middle, where the sun ought to be. The rest of us kept to our orbits. We never crashed into each other. No one ever went missing like a rogue comet.

  My orbit went like this: get up, check Asta’s diaper, take a shower, eat my breakfast, get dressed, walk to the bus, be at school, come home, cook dinner, get Little Harold in a bath, get him in his PJs, listen to Dad read to Asta while I do the dishes, do my homework, go to bed.

  Dad’s orbit involved work at the mill, fixing things (something always needs fixing), and reading.

  He sat by Asta and read aloud to her every night. He started his reading project right after he dropped out of high school. He liked to read, but he decided he didn’t want to waste his time, so he started reading Nobel Prize winners. He figured that would weed out the crap. Dad is very direct that way. He doesn’t reinvent the
wheel.

  Asta probably didn’t understand the stories he read to her about a black sorrel mare on the flower-strewn avenues or farting Chinese buses. But maybe she heard her name when he read about stubborn people in Iceland. Maybe the sound of her name meant something to her. Or maybe it meant no more than other names from other stories. Eréndira. Umaima. If Dad had opened a different book during the nights before Asta was born, she might have had a different name. Just like if I had been a boy, I would have been Harold. But I’m Loa because Mom liked the sound. Asta might have had a different name, but she still would have been slipping away from us.

  But when Dad read at night, she stopped grinding her teeth and swallowing air.

  When Dad read, we all grew still, and we were all together.

  Even Little Harold’s speedy orbit slowed down enough for sleep to take over. It wasn’t like he was listening, but he knew he was supposed to be a little bit quiet, to stop running and bouncing off the walls.

  My little brother basically operates at two speeds: sonic fast and sound asleep. He hits the floor running every day with big plans and exciting ideas. Usually he starts talking in the middle of a sentence when he wakes up. I don’t know if it was half said when he fell asleep or if he’s finishing a conversation he was having in his dreams. Little Harold talks to himself a lot, because no one else has a clue what he is talking about most of the time.

  One day I caught him dyeing field mice green with food coloring. He’d made himself a live trap out of a bucket. It was pretty nifty engineering for a little kid. Anyway, he was involved in some sort of experiment that required the mice to be green, but I made him turn them loose. The other day, he was talking about a fire-type Pokémon in our woodshed, which worries me when I think about it—Pokémon may be imaginary, but fire isn’t, and the woodshed would burn like crazy if Little Harold started a fire in there.

  Still, show me any kid in footie pajamas who trots in a perfect elliptical orbit day after day and I’ll show you a screwed-up kid. Little Harold was doing just fine. He was doing just what a kid ought to do.

  Mom’s orbit was like the orbit of moms through time. The features of her days were mostly food, messes, and worry. Cave women had days like that, with the occasional cave bear added to the mix. Homesteading women had days like that, with blizzards and plagues of locusts to break the monotony.

  My mom’s orbit passed through a lot of clinic waiting rooms and emergency room visits while she was taking care of Asta. I think she would have been glad to swap that for a cave bear or a plague of locusts. Those are temporary challenges. A person can at least put up a fight against a cave bear, maybe win with a long enough stick and a sharp enough rock. A person can hunker down and wait out a cloud of locusts—cut the horse loose from the buckboard, hide the baby under your skirt, and grit your teeth while the bugs crawl all over you. It isn’t fun, but it’s doable. It’s doable because maybe you won’t have to bury that baby. Maybe the bear won’t eat it. But there is no way to fight a genetic defect—I know that now. Mom probably knew it a long time ago, but she never stopped orbiting. She always kept her face turned toward Asta.

  So that was how we spent our lives. We were a shiny bright machine, a family of planets circling our own little star.

  And then The Bony Guy took a sledgehammer to us.

  . . .

  I wonder why they sent an ambulance the night Asta died. It wasn’t like there was any hurry anymore. They didn’t turn on the siren or lights when they came or when they went. The only sound was the crunch of the tires on the gravel. Silent ambulances give me the creeps.

  Maybe they sent it because bodies fit in ambulances. The paramedics have the wheeled carts that slide right in. Everything was convenient.

  At the point the ambulance and paramedics came, I was glad to have something to think about. I was sitting in my grandfather’s chair by the window holding Little Harold on my lap. I was supposed to take care of him, to keep him out of the way. He didn’t really need to see anything. He wouldn’t understand what was going on, and Mom and Dad needed to think about Asta and the arrangements. He would have probably liked to watch some cartoons, but that just seemed wrong. So I held him and asked him questions about Pokémon. He always had a lot to say about Pokémon.

  Once in a while, I would say something like, “I like Cubone.”

  That would get him revved up again, “The lonely Pokémon. Did you know that skull on his head belonged to his mom? He isn’t very strong. Even when Cubones revolve—”

  “Evolve.”

  “Eee-volve . . . evolve into Marowak, they aren’t so powerful. I like Pikachu and Mew and Hypno and Chimchar. They are a way lot stronger. Chimchar has a fire on his tail.”

  I needed something to think about while he was talking, and so I focused on the ambulance. After it finally left, after I couldn’t hear the tires crunching on the gravel anymore, Dad came in and said we should all try to get some sleep.

  So I took Little Harold into his room and put him under his covers. Then I told him to budge over, and I climbed in with him. Usually, I hate it if I have to share a bed with Little Harold. He’s got sharp little elbows and kicks off the covers. That night, though, I wanted to hold him. I waited until he fell asleep before I let myself cry. Tears are kind of oily, have you noticed? I hate the wet spot they make on the pillow, but I couldn’t turn it over without waking Little Harold.

  I was just there in the dark, listening to Little Harold breathe, wishing I could go to sleep.

  I never wish for sleep anymore.

  . . .

  We are on Mars, I think, because the world outside is full of red dust blowing through the air. I shut the curtains because I don’t want to see that red dust. It looks like powdered blood. It’s just so dismal.

  I’m trying to put an orrery together, but I can’t find the ball that is supposed to be the sun. I think it might have rolled under the bed.

  Then I realize that the real sun has disappeared—not just gone down, disappeared. This planet and all the other planets are going to stop going around in circles. Everything is perfectly dark. The planets are flying blind. I can feel heat leaking out of my body.

  I can hear someone breathing. It isn’t me. Then I see The Bony Guy. He is giving off his own light, like a glow stick. He is holding the ball from the orrery. He is holding the sun, and he isn’t going to give it back.

  The ride to school is a little better since there is less gawking when we go past the blind curve where Esther died. The exploded tree is still there. The black-on-black skid marks on the pavement are still there. Eventually, I guess there will be one of those little white crosses to remind people that death is around every corner, in every barrow pit, and at every intersection, but there isn’t one yet. Looking out the window when we pass just isn’t the most interesting thing to do anymore. It’s yesterday’s gruesome. Nothing to see here, folks.

  I still try to focus on something else when we go by that place. Like the boot on the jerk across the aisle. It’s got shit on it. He could have knocked it off, but he’s a jerk, so he didn’t, and now he’s got his feet up on the seat. I don’t want to get all Miss Manners, but what a fuckwad.

  The fuckwad’s boot. I need to keep my mind on the fuckwad’s boot. For one thing, it’s a lot better than noticing that he keeps sticking his hand down his pants and scratching his unit. For another, I don’t want to go where my mind might take me if I looked out the window.

  The fuckwad’s boot. The theory of the Freak Observer has something to say to the fuckwad’s boot.

  It says, “It is easier to create a boot than a universe. It is easier to create a naked brain than to a create whole creature. And everything is so infinite that those things are bound to happen—Boot!—Brain! Do you understand?”

  The boot says nothing. A chunk of shit falls off it, but it says nothing.

  It is now safe for the brain to look out the window.

  . . .

  That Friday that Esther died
, I was standing outside, waiting for the bus when she yelled out the truck window and asked if I wanted to ride home with her and Abel.

  I wonder, if I had ridden the bus like I was supposed to, would I be working the graveyard shift with Mom at Cozy Pines? Would Esther still be dead?

  It doesn’t matter if the answer is yes or no. This is not a thought experiment. She can’t be alive and dead at the same time like Schrödinger’s imaginary cat. Esther is dead—and I know it.

  . . .

  If you are in a hurry, a school bus is the worst possible travel option. It moves slowly down its route, stopping at trailer parks, gravel roads, private drives, and railroad tracks. It doesn’t matter if there is no train. A bus stops and flaps its doors. It doesn’t matter if there is no one waiting to go to school. The bus stops and flaps its doors.

  One day while I was riding the school bus, I made a rough estimate of all the time I’ve spent being hauled around. It made me sad, that number. Should I count the time waiting for the school bus in the dark? Should I count the time spent walking through the snow to get to the bus stop?

  It’s not like I have any place better to be.

  Mostly, I read while I’m on the bus. If you need proof that I have no friends, you have it now: I read on the bus. Sometimes I try to write, even though it’s impossible to write without scribbling and making a mess. When I don’t have a book, I just stare out the window at things I have seen so many times before. We are at the animal shelter corner. We turn north. We pass the university, and then we go over the bridge. We take the ramp onto the interstate and zoom through the canyon, past the truck stops and trailer courts with no interstate access. You can’t get there from here or here from there. We lose the interstate, and we are on the two-lane winding road that follows the river. Here is the lumber mill where my dad used to work. Here is the curve where Esther died. Here is another bridge, the river winds around, and another bridge. And here is the road home. All I have to do is get out, cross the railroad tracks, go up the hill, through another trailer court, past the cliff, past a place that frightens me in my dreams, up a hill, through a barbwire fence, down a hill, and I’m home. Yahoo!