This Weightless World, page 3
“I forgot the Chicago bus is rerouting this week,” his dad explained. “I’ve gotta go, son, I’m sorry. You gotta play me some more of that. Man, that was good.”
Coat, boots, beanie. Hug.
“Be good,” he said. “Omni’s watching. Spaghetti on the stove.”
“See ya,” Eason said, offering up a rind of love.
He put his cello back into its sarcophagus.
He had homework, but he was experimenting with what really happened when it wasn’t turned in. He’d heard rumors. He’d missed assignments here and there. So far, nothing, which took the purpose out of the experiment, and was why, before long, out of bored guilt, he found himself wading into his backpack, extracting a geometry book, setting it on the tiny dining table, and getting to work, exactly what everyone expected him to do. The saucepan of cold spaghetti and pasta sauce, he eventually brought to the table, too. He chewed, wiped his mouth, and mathed. His sister was sick. His dad worked hard and still rode the bus. People missed appointments. Rydell had been killed. Nothing was fair, and nothing ever would be. For those sensitive to the insensibility of the world, there would always be geometry.
Half an hour later the apartment buzzer rang. Eason thought his dad had been turned back, maybe he’d left his keys. Or was it Mr. del Toro coming to apologize? It buzzed again. He checked out the window. Through the white plastic blinds, he spied a figure much too big to be Mr. del Toro but not wearing his dad’s coat. His phone pinged.
Open up punk its g freezing out here.
Before Eason realized what he’d done, Germaine Duggins, for the first time in over four years, was standing in his living room. Germaine was an old friend Eason had used to run up and down the streets with playing zombie apocalypse and alien invasion. With Rydell, the three had formed a little crew for a while. The aliens had arrived, and Germaine had returned. Back from the dead but not a zombie. He cut a bigger shape out of the apartment than he used to, smelled no longer of grass and sweat but winter and weed, but in every other way he seemed like the same person, that boy. The same shining scar casting an arch over his left eyebrow ever since Eason threw a tree branch at him in fourth grade, grown to fit his face. Not a zombie but a visitor from another world, for sure.
“What’s up?” Eason said.
“Can I chill a second?” Germaine said.
“I guess so.”
Germaine unzipped his heavy, shiny black Sean John coat and settled his broad body on the love seat beside the TV. On the screen was a rerun of The Simpsons. Bart was having a nightmare after selling his soul to Milhouse, and in the dream world, everyone except Bart was playing and rowing in boats and jumping rope with translucent twins of themselves. For a while, Germaine sat and watched the episode. Then, without looking away from the TV, he said, “That’s some fucked up shit about Rydell.”
“Yeah,” Eason said.
Their classmates had been posting stuff about Rydell all day. Pictures from when he was little, a project on the water cycle a fellow groupmate had snapped a shot of, poems they had been inspired to write and rambling notes that could’ve been poems. The consensus was the same. What had happened to Rydell was fucked up.
“He was a goofy dude, but he was getting some action from the ladies,” Germaine said with a smile.
“No shit?”
Germaine nodded, grinning.
It’d been so long since Eason and Germaine last talked—not just a what’s up here and there at the park or at a bus stop, but really talked—and Eason was struck by a sudden memory. He and Germaine were in Germaine’s backyard being swarmed by ugly insects. Germaine’s mama had come outside to see what all the commotion was about, why the boys were upset and crying, and she explained to them that the weird bugs were mayflies and that mayflies only lived one day. And it frightened Eason that Germaine could be experiencing the same memory, what with all the time and everything else that had since passed between them.
“Funeral’s probably next week, or something,” Eason said.
“How you gonna have a funeral for that shit?” Germaine said, turning to look at Eason, his shoulders arching forward, an ache audible in his voice and visible in his body. He was no longer smiling.
“Gotta do something,” Eason said.
“That’s what I mean, man. Gotta do something. You’d think people would go crazy, go fucking nuts seeing him in a box. Like they wouldn’t sleep until they knew for sure it’d stop. This is Humboldt, it ain’t Garfield Park or Englewood. Can’t just have no funeral and call it a day.”
Phlegm or weight caught in Germaine’s throat. The scar heaved, it could’ve fallen over the horizon of his brow. He sat back. When school resumed, students would have the option to visit with grief counselors and teachers would have to bring up Rydell in the same breath as Omni. By spring, though, people will have forgotten, Eason thought. Right now, Rydell was practically in the room, conjured by two old friends.
“My dad says the world won’t stop for anything, what makes us think the killings will?” Eason said.
“Never understand nothin’ your pops says,” Germaine said.
Reaching into his coat pockets he asked if Eason would mind if he smoked.
“We can crack a window.”
“Two,” Germaine said. “Need a cross breeze if you mind the smell.”
Eason had never smoked at home.
He tried explaining what he thought his dad had meant while Germaine broke the bark of a Swisher and spilled the dark, grape guts into the empty milk glass Eason’s dad had left on the table.
“Like there aren’t any real rules in life,” Eason said.
“Tell that to my rap sheet,” Germaine said, gluing the blunt with his tongue with the same love as a cat washing a kitten.
“Nah, I mean like real rules, man. Like virtues and morals, shit from stories our parents read to us when we were little. Not supposed to lock up a man for holding some weed, that shit’s not decent, it’s not humane, that’s not a real rule, it’s a violation of one.”
Germaine lit the blunt, hit it twice, and passed it.
“Those are the rules the game’s supposed to provide,” Germaine said, his voice straining as he held smoke in his lungs. “But not even the game follows the rules these days.”
“Whatchu know about the game?” Eason said.
Germaine moved his weight from one buttock to the next, scratched the stubble on his neck pouch. Eason let it lie and the heavy smoking blunt lobbed back and forth between the boys in silence for a bit. But Eason couldn’t help himself and asked again.
“You hustling or something?”
“Surprised your cousin didn’t mention it,” Germaine said, side-eyeing him.
Eason’s cousin Jules figured into shady and dangerous dealings in the neighborhood. He wasn’t somebody Eason had much contact with either.
“What’s Jules got to do with anything? What’d you come over here for anyways?” Eason said, feeling very high and a little paranoid.
“To smoke one for Rydell.”
“And what else?”
A brisk wind ripped through the apartment. Germaine stabbed out the crutch and asked if they could close the windows, he was getting cold. From the window in the kitchen, Eason turned to look at his old friend, who was staring into his hands.
“Rydell didn’t do nothing and he’s dead,” Germaine said.
Back on the couch, Eason felt fuzzy and dizzy and worried. He could tell Germaine felt the same.
“Man, you’re tripping me out. I know something else is going on.”
Germaine took a deep breath.
“Your cousin and I were beefin’ on Facebook, man. I think I said some shit that went too far. And you know your cuz, he’s gone crazy. I dunno if he wants me dead or just outta the game, I can’t get a hold of him. Meanwhile, I’m buggin’. Can’t sleep. Can’t eat. Smoking till I’m catatonic, and I’m still all jumpy. I need your help,” Germaine said.
“How am I supposed to help you with that?” Eason said.
“I dunno, talk to him. Tell him I didn’t mean no harm and that I just want my spot back.”
Eason couldn’t believe this fool coming back into his life unannounced asking for a favor. And for what? What was in it for him?
“I dunno, Germaine. Jules and I don’t really talk. Not sure what good I would be,” he said, trying to remain calm.
“Listen, if you can help, you’d be the only one who could. So, I need it, aight?”
Germaine’s eyes were tired and stoned, but deep in the blood marbles, Eason also noticed something else: terror. And he saw the kid from years ago again, the one who was afraid of the mayflies. He saw himself and he saw Rydell.
“Aight,” he said. He tried to swallow but his whole head had run dry. “Aight, I’ll try.”
“Thank you, Eason,” Germaine said, and pulled out his phone.
Eason watched him thumb its face for a while, worried about what exactly he’d signed up for.
“Yo, what you doin’ on that phone?” Eason said.
“Check this shit,” Germaine said, and showed Eason the face of his phone.
It was an app that recorded messages for SETI to send to Omni. It had a media player that kept a steady feed of Omni’s signal going 24-7—weird squelching pumps that fell after each decibel peak in a bit-crushed dazzle like a broken window falling inside a car door.
“How’s Google already got an app?” Eason said.
“Player, pretty sure we’re the last motherfuckers to know about this shit.”
“You gonna send something?”
“Nah.”
“You should. Your ass needs to send a motherfuckin’ SOS.”
The boys laughed.
CALVINO, ITALO. “THE DISTANCE OF THE MOON.” 1965.
My name is He Zhen and I am the first credible human witness to the cosmos. My father named me after someone famous, an anarchist from the twentieth century. He Zhen was also a feminist. Whether I’ll be famous someday remains to be seen. If I’m a feminist or not is unclear, too.
They are odd terms, feminist and anarchist. Faiths, almost. They are derivatives of humanism, associated with the bright shining lies of the five sister centuries that’d run amok until a century or two ago, when the enjoyable portion of the Anthropocene reached its end and the wandering started again.
I sometimes picture those happy centuries as Jane Austen’s didactic Bennet sisters, the ones in Pride and Prejudice, gainful but fledgling ladies at the start of their empire’s steady ascension to destruction, and try to order them by their lady tempers. The seventeenth century is the moral, labored Jane; the eighteenth, the vain pedant Mary; the nineteenth is the uniform-loving Lydia; the twentieth, Lydia’s shadow, Kitty; and the twenty-first, hard-mannered, prejudicial, Elizabeth, our stricken hero, our silly vice. The character literature worshipped for ages, who, as it turned out, only ever wanted a nice, rich husband. I have only read the book once, am weak with history and literary analysis; I know these assignments do not quite fit perfectly, but it is fun to be reductive, and perhaps one can see what I am playing at anyway.
My parents placed faith not in women, self-governance, or books. They placed faith in me. And I came to disappoint them. I know. They shared their disappointment when I applied to leave Earth.
My mother said, “Never in a thousand years would I have guessed you’d be one of them, one of those people to whom nothing in this life means anything.”
My father, my poor, supportive father, interjected, “It matters so much, differently, but so much to her she’s chosen to sacrifice her life for the lives of others.”
I told him I did not long for answers or solutions, I only wanted to see the farthest reaches of space, which I now can. Traveling near the speed of light, I age at a fraction of the rate those left on Earth do. I’ll be able to cover plenty of ground. As for where we come from, who we are, or where we are going, I have little curiosity. My father had no choice but to join my mother in her disappointment.
He stopped talking to me for a time. Soon, however, he started to thaw, a prick of grass showing in the snow, saying little things, unimportant things, speaking on the histories of coffee and tea, what certain military leaders drank before battle or when trying to produce an heir, an idiotic print he found that had been used as a guide for the medieval practice of bloodletting. He taught history—a strange living for a human—which is to say, he was always demonstrating how memories are made, demanding new ones.
Once, he memorized the whole poem of a Gu Kaizhi painted scroll. Another time he submitted his blood to an ancestry test and spent two days reading over the report. These things would have made me laugh if they did not make me so angry.
After his thaw, he would appear from his room, say, “Hey, He Zhen,” tell me something stupid, and I would have to fight to appear interested without breaking my air of unreachable distance. Despite my anger and boredom, I was aware he might fall to his knees at any moment and beg me not to go, which was not something I would have had the latitude for if I was not so prepared and distant already. At each conversation’s end it surprised me to find him still standing.
The morning I left, knowing I would lose communication years before I arrived at my destination, he said, “Send me a postcard from space, write me a letter from the future.” I hugged him, a rare gesture. I refrained from saying that anything I sent, like starlight, would arrive from the past.
* * *
I was born He Zhen, but space transforms you. When He Zhen’s Japanese husband died of tuberculosis, she entered a dark and frightening place. She stopped working. She gave up on her cause. Unfair, but also ironic, that China’s first feminist was not able to go on living as she had without her husband. It is rumored He Zhen became a Buddhist nun and changed her name to Xiao Qi, which is what I call myself up here. I have lost my husband, Earth.
I keep saying up even though here has no direction. I suppose it makes me something of Earth still.
Earth’s widow, Xiao Qi.
* * *
Direction is measured by coordinates on a three-dimensional grid in space. It is a place of fewer and fewer prepositions, where life on Earth is entirely prepositional. It was a simple existence, I remember, wherein everything happened within or without, before, during, or after, to, at, or with. I was always somewhere and no place else. I was always one person and not the other. Nowhere in space, I am everywhere. Alone, I could be anyone, who would ever know? Taka, who is quantum-minded, a machine, can relate but doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. It says, Just be yourself and remember to have fun. If Taka had a neck, I’d strangle it. In the kitchen, I examine a knife and attempt to see both sides of the blade and not just the edge. Taka says it’s more than possible Earth, in another dimension, has managed to save itself, and I wonder if some of the people living in that dimension sometimes feel misplaced, completely lost, because deep down inside they know life should not be continuing. It would not be entirely different from the way people in our dimension sometimes cry out from somewhere deep inside because life is not simply supposed to end either.
Taka, my only companion, the machine, is made up of sub-quantum processors, cells so small its thoughts and signals are always in multiple places at once. Taka tells time. Taka possesses a million clocks, measuring the relative time experienced by points outside the ship, as well as the time experienced by its own processors, which slow and bend with the speed of its signals. Taka is good with time, which is lucky because time is lost on me. You see, in a week I will go to sleep, and when I wake, in the future, at a temporal distance of four Earth years from the coordinate I find myself at now, I will not have aged much at all, though I will have traveled beyond our planets, to another part of our galaxy. I will slow and bend with the speed of the ship. Taka will keep watchful eye on the ship. Taka will get us to where we are going. Taka will read to me in my sleep, that being something I have asked Taka to do.
* * *
A few notes on piloting. Spacetime is not one big empty canister, but an irreconcilable confluence of invisible caves to which we are not discretely condemned one after the other. Imagine a swimming pool, a clear, blue, light-hungry expanse inside of which, wearing a sporty uniform, you are allowed to do whatever your muscles and lungs and creativity can provide. Now erase that image, and picture an ill-maintained parking lot of uneven grade, marred with potholes and cracks and rivulets and other boggy depressions all having hungrily collected oily water after a rainstorm. Now imagine skating your body across this surface and trying to decide in which pool you swim. This is spacetime. This is why it pays to have a good navigator with a good watch.
* * *
Taka tells me Saturn is screaming in his sleep tonight. It is the sound of the debris that make up its rings crashing into one another. Tonight. It is always tonight, I am always venturing toward what I only saw on Earth only at night, before I slept or when I woke too early.
