This Weightless World, page 15
Eason didn’t really get it, he’d become a dealer and Germaine was living this new carefree life as a basketball fan. Had Germaine started listening to Bach, Eason would’ve suspected a supernatural force had swept down and made him and Germaine switch places. He didn’t really get the new life he was living, the sudden abundance of money and feelings, feelings of control and powerlessness and guilt.
“How’d you do it?” Eason asked. “Knowing little kids are smoking your shit. I mean, I’ve seen some girls we went to middle school with out there with these old men, you know?”
Germaine looked at him very seriously.
“I just figured, you know, nobody likes their job,” Germaine said, and Eason reiterated that he was dumb as hell.
Eason lit a blunt. His own weed, Germaine was impressed. It wasn’t anything serious, he never pinched anything off for himself, Jules gave him weed for free, and he only smoked sometimes. They partook near an open window, over a cereal bowl, to keep from dropping the cherry and burning a hole in the couch.
“I’ma tell you some shit,” Germaine said when he was good and high. “But I don’t want you judging me.”
Eason wondered what kind of trouble was Germaine in this time.
“Two nights ago, I had this dream, this nightmare about Rydell. He wasn’t a ghost or anything. He was alive still, I could tell, you know? But he was all morose and shit. So, I asked him, Rydell, what’s up? And he says some shit about how he was still stuck in the Water Temple. And in my dream, I’m like, what the fuck? The dream ends, and I wake up and I’m still confused. Then, this morning, I remembered how when we were little, we’d watch his ass play that Zelda game, and how he could never get out of that Water Temple level. Like he’d hit a wrong switch somewhere in the level that couldn’t be flipped back, and he needed to start the whole game over, but he didn’t want to, so he just quit playing. You remember that? It was like a glitch, or something.”
“Kind of,” Eason said, although he remembered it perfectly. He’d never liked video games but could watch people play like it was a movie. This game was old even then, on an N64, Rydell’s cousin’s, or someone’s. To get to the Water Temple, you don these iron boots and a blue tunic and sink to the bottom of this lake, where these dolphin people lived. The music down there was all shimmering beauty. Rydell had done something out of order, maybe he’d been trying to skip a step, and then he’d gotten stuck. It was like the Japanese game designers had set up an internal mechanism to punish him. They’d stopped hanging out soon after.
“You ever think Rydell beat that level?” Eason said.
“Dunno. It was a hard-ass level, man.”
“Bet that level wouldn’t be that hard now. Kids were trippin’ back then saying shit was hard. Games today are hard.”
“Gotta do a bunch of math and shit.”
“Your player’s got a job, life-threatening illness, kids to feed.”
Germaine looked out the window, at the top of the building across the street, the sky above.
“Fool, what we doin’ today?” he said.
“Let’s go downtown,” Eason said, which they’d never done before.
* * *
THE LOOP MADE Eason and Germaine feel crazy. All the fast-moving businesspeople, restless cops and out-of-towners, cleaving their purses and shopping bags and briefcases away from the boys as they passed. Achy light shook down the glass skyscrapers in waves, blinding the boys and making them sweat.
The city quieted down on the museum campus. The Adler Planetarium sat at the end of a stony, man-made jetty that reached like a hand into Lake Michigan on the Loop’s south side. The structure looked ancient, Greek or Roman. From the front steps, facing north, the boys caught a view of the city where everything on the left was Chicago and everything on the right was water, separated down the middle by a crooked line of beach, the skyscrapers along Michigan Avenue like a row of riot police bracing the city against the lake’s tide. The water, chapped with huge frothing waves, let out the screams and shouts of hundreds of swimmers. It sounded like a war.
With their student IDs, they got into the planetarium for cheap. The first thing Eason noticed was how weird and out of place all the glowing meters and dials and computer imaging software looked against the old-fashioned architecture. In the lobby, he spotted a lamp in the shape of the Eiffel Tower spread a fan of buttery light on an Atlas figurine mounted on the wall beside it. Geometric patterns fringed the carpet. Bronze grates were fastened to the ceiling’s air ducts. The place shouted richness, whiteness. And Eason was about to suggest they leave when Germaine whispered, “Yo, I think we’re the only people here,” and, looking around to see if this was true, Eason realized that aside from the employees, they were, and that everyone working that afternoon in the Adler—the guards in glossy coats, the women restocking puzzles and mini telescopes and sparkly gel bags in the gift shop, the guy who’d sold them their tickets—was Black. A few feet past the front desk, on an LCD screen mounted into a wall, a brother named Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about the universe.
They bypassed exhibits on the Mars rover mission, the moon landing, and Saturn V for a large glass wall overlooking Lake Michigan. The planetarium had the best view of the lake Eason had ever seen. In the middle of the glassed-in lake was a small screen.
Omni, a smooth orb, glowed there. Slow churning clouds marbled its surface and bathed the boys in pinkish light. Eason was surprised to see it. The planetarium had postponed a huge exhibition, a gala, not sure what they’d have had to say about Omni so soon, but this video was there, pressed against the lake, the white sky, the birds, and the unfocused horizon.
He tried to look at Omni, the pearl of it, but the waves kept taking his eyes. This was what Rydell had missed. Omni, then not Omni. There was a color the sky and the lake made where they met, a sky-lake blue or a lake-sky white.
He tried looking into the center of Omni, a still color at its heart, the glowing fuchsia they colored everything for a while, flaking off buildings and draining from people’s hair now. Omni had moved on, Earth was stuck, Earth felt wrong. The living felt wrong.
“Looks like a Pixar movie,” Germaine said.
“Yeah.”
“Pretty good graphics.”
“Yeah.”
The lake behind the screen was a churning endless blue drinking clouds from the sky. It was all right there. Eason thought he could walk into it, straight to the bottom.
AFTER COLLEGE, RAMONA’S ROOMMATES MOVED west to a mossy city overrun with bicycles to work remotely for Adobe and write lifestyle blogs about tiny houses. They tried taking Ramona with them, but she told them she’d never live anywhere where Birkenstocks were acceptable footwear, where dogs were welcome inside stores. She’d read all of Portland’s basements were rotted, withering colons, and imagined their little bungalow on the hill would collapse neatly into its own wet basement. She’d planned a yard sale but simply threw out all the belongings they’d stuck her with instead. When the lease ended, she put a Turkish metal coffee table, an industrial medicine cabinet, and a mannequin called Tabby into a storage unit in Bridgeport and went home to Boston. Nothing had quite found its place again since Jesse.
She returned to a job at a bakery she’d worked at in high school, lived in her old bedroom, frequented a bar where, the last time they’d seen her, she was sixteen and grabbing a foggy plastic pitcher to throw up into. She drove up and down neighborhood roads named after Colonial trails in her mother’s red Toyota Solara, curving through the blind turns that lived off mangled first cars and teenage lives. She stood beside campfires at night. On the beach, the wood was never dry and sent gray smoke into her old friends’ faces. These adults were the last of the boys and girls who’d become fascinated with one another when she became fascinated with computers.
Her uncle was a realtor, and on her days off she’d drive up to his properties in Gloucester and Worcester and lead different lives whole afternoons at a time, roaming deserted mansions owned by former Celtics and Red Sox players, pretending to be a realtor herself if security asked. Brushing their topiary animals, taking in their verandas, she felt like a girl in a secret garden. Naked in a famous benchwarmer’s saltwater pool, she watched three peacocks charge the deck like prehistoric linebackers. Clouds cottoned overhead into a complex textile of evanescent plans. Gone in contrails, tightropes of saliva and watercolor blooms, as soon as they appeared, were all the unfinished internship applications, the recommendations for positions in California and New York, her login username and password for the JET Programme to join a man she could’ve been in love with in Kyoto. Indecision had made her itinerant in her own life, coming and going like the salty palm-size waves cupping her mouth every now and again as she lay on her back in the water. Had she gone to Kyoto she would’ve stayed until Fukushima, ventured to DC, never eaten fish again. In New York she’d have started at a hundred thousand dollars a year with Zocdoc, making even more after they broke into the Affordable Care Act business. In California, she’d have fallen in with Google anyway, interned for two months before being taken on full-time. Instead she swam naked in untended pools.
Two years later, back in Chicago, a friend dragged her out of her apartment to a show at Bottom Lounge. The band was a sprawling post-folk outfit with fiddles and washboards, guitars, a dulcimer, resonator, drummer, a lap steel, and a cello; they raised the roof beams with Appalachian vocal harmonies and whiskey. The cellist, a small man with a patchy beard and a floppy music stand, struggled to find his way with the group. His sheet music kept folding over. Ramona thought he was hilarious, this disgruntled little man caught in the middle of all this joy and salt-of-the-earth camaraderie. She noticed his every mistake but only because of the faces he would make. At some point, the drummer told him to take a solo during the next song—the fiddler was too drunk—and the poor cellist’s eyes dilated psychedelically. The cellist shook his head. Four minutes later, however, alone with an open string, he sailed the edge of his bow through phrases and exercises Ramona thought were lifted from classical music. She’d remember each line illuminating a room inside her. Rooms she had not been to in years. Rooms of strangers. The movements maintained the consistent pomp, bawdiness, and sorrow of four hundred years of Continental music and were completely out of place with everything the band had played, and she loved them. He found the A at her center and had her sit down and stay awhile, having walked her to her apogee and back.
After the set he spent his gig pay drinking himself into a nervous drunkenness. When Ramona sat next to him at the bar, he sobered up, remained nervous. Instantly, she confused his insecurity for intense attraction. She would tell her friends he was charmingly awkward.
“I don’t usually play with them,” he said, nodding toward the rest of the band, who’d started a game of pool. “It’s my first time, actually. They asked me to sit in for their cellist ten hours ago—that’s why I sucked so much. Normally—”
“Couldn’t tell,” Ramona said. “It all sounded like shit to me.”
They agreed to smoke a cigarette neither of them had. Outside, Ramona rested at ease that he was taller than her. She could be forgiven for having standards. Like he was speaking German, his sentences circled their subjects. What he meant to ask was: Did she like her job at iTunes? Why did she come back to Chicago? Was she seeing anyone? He was funny, used colorful language, joked openly about taboo subjects. They could be their most honest when they weren’t being serious, she thought. Recovering from a snort he’d inspired with a scenario about a folk revival taken so seriously they’d devolve into a minstrel show, she kissed him. Saliva strung a line between their mouths and snapped. Recovered from his confidence, he rested back into uncertainty.
“Was that inappropriate?” he asked, like he’d been the one to kiss her.
“The kiss or the joke?”
Obviously, both were. She spent the next five years of her life with that man. Whether it was a mistake or not was irrelevant if something could be learned from it.
* * *
THERE WAS A sizeable contingent of dogs at Ajit’s Fourth of July party. Ajit was on Ramona’s Herodotus team and resided in a co-living house in Palo Alto. Each of his housemates, eight geniuses of varying ages and backgrounds, each of whom was attempting to adapt AI to a different field of study—deep-sea surveys, weather, law, urban planning, polyamorous dating—had one dog apiece, but everyone else who’d been invited over evidently had at least one as well and had decided to bring it too. “I hate leaving him at home,” they’d say. “If you have one, why not show it a good time?” “She loves people.” The preliminary fireworks being shot off across the neighborhood sent the animals into a panic. Some shat on the floor, many pissed, most cried and hid. Within an hour sedative drops had to be administered in the animals’ treats. Around dusk, shortly before the real fireworks, many of the dogs had fallen asleep or else were lumbering about in heavy shag swirls. Ramona was maybe one cocktail away from snuggling up with one of the drugged pups when she heard a familiar but unknowable sound rushing over the fence from the street. Locust-like but as mournful as the sea. Symphonic? Polyphonic? Sevi would’ve known, but he’d stayed home. The sound was sobering. It was Omni-7xc.
Everyone in the backyard, drugged dogs included, snapped to and turned their ears to the sound. A dozen people climbed out of the pool, fully clothed, sculptural and ecstatic in their sodden drapings. “This song is so played out,” someone said. Another person shushed Ramona, even though she hadn’t been talking. Then, the music stopped. Ramona touched her phone. Be still my heart. She almost called Sevi—what cheap symmetry that’d have been—had someone not shouted, “Fuck off, assholes!” nearly causing her to stumble into the pool.
Something had happened in June. One minute, she and Sevi couldn’t keep their hands and mouths off one another, and the next they seemed to want less and less to do with each other. They’d started reading Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick aloud, creating voices for each of the characters and rolling around laughing in bed, but they never finished the book, much less puzzled out its interrogation of American gun culture. They kept saying, “I love you.” It was nothing catastrophic, they’d fallen out of love before, but everything after Omni, even the most familiar disappointments, felt freshly deserved, and she was kicking herself for having instigated another go at it, for having brought him into her home, for having believed it would’ve been different in any way. For what? she asked herself. And in what order had all this come to pass? One minute she’d simply been awaiting her doom, the next she was planning the future, which revolved at least in part around her ex-boyfriend.
Gathering herself, she walked away from the edge of the water to the side gate and spied a parked SUV with a glowing fuchsia paint job. A joke. A prank. A performance art piece. An act of terrorism. The audio started up again, this time it was the voice of Sally Field crying, “You like me. You really like me!” Then the red and blue strobe of police lights arrived, and everyone let out a cheer. Ramona sighed, wanted another beer. Maybe the driver had violated a noise ordinance, but it was their First Amendment right to act a fool.
The order of events returned to her: She’d allowed herself to feel alone and guilty enough to fall in love with Sevi all over again on New Year’s Day, then Sevi had brought his bitterness with him to California, and now there was some sort of bizarre love triangle between them. Maybe it wasn’t that simple, maybe she shared some of the blame, but didn’t Sevi understand that she’d run out of space for any more blame? He’d become transfixed on Herodotus, wanting to discuss its ethics, where it would lead at every opportunity. He refused to believe her when she said Herodotus was nothing but an organizational method, a way to stave off the information apocalypse, that it was still basically just an idea, operating at less than 5 percent. He had no idea that team Herodotus had been cleared to suck up personal data from the approximately 89 percent of users who hadn’t updated their privacy settings, nearly five billion searches and the accompanying user data a day. Missing Sevi and not missing Sevi in Ajit’s backyard, watching men treat girlfriends and female strangers alike like shit, Ramona was reminded of the shame that arrived each morning at the foot of the bed of every woman who allowed guilt to shape her life.
Without the sound of Omni clouding the air, Ramona could hear conversations starting up again all around her.
“A Sophistic approach to education could work, especially with crowd-sourced curriculum. And it could solve grad student funding issues, too. A group of parents could easily pay a student’s way through grad school in exchange for him teaching their kids. They could also provide scholarships for a kid or two from a low-income neighborhood.”
“I think most people would be a lot less outraged about things if they were more intelligent.”
“And that’s really what the idea of a tech-industry media company is all about. Stop dumbing it down for the masses, stop entertaining their neolithic ethics, and tell real stories about real lives.”
“Charter cities would work. In some ways, Indian reservations are charter cities. They just don’t have functional education systems. Which Todd was talking about earlier. He thinks Sophism might work.”
It was all so blissful and painful to hear. Dumb ideas and good intentions rooted in privilege and bias that could be expressed freely without fear because everyone within earshot was too intelligent to get upset about anything, because there weren’t any journalists around to scold them, and because these were crowdsourced ideas and crowdsourced ideas were inherently blameless, lacking any single author, evolving as naturally as opposable thumbs. It was good to hear human voices, it was good to hear plans coming together, it was good to hear people talking about their work on a national holiday.
But then suddenly everyone turned to their phones and a silence fell over the backyard. Before Ramona had a chance to check her own phone, Ajit appeared and walked her to his bedroom inside.
