The Universe in Miniature in Miniature Read online

  Tonight, nothing’s happening. Ryan’s already asleep, and his mom and dad are watching TV in the den. We are watching them lazily on Lucy’s monitor. This afternoon, Ryan fell out of his wheelchair at his day-clinic, and the main topic of conversation tonight, between husband and wife, has been a discussion of how mindful the employees are where he goes. Dad says not mindful enough, Mom says usually mindful, this was an anomaly. “He hardly has a bruise,” she says to him, near the end of the conversation.

  I have my smallest model yet in my lap. It’s so small Mercury is just implied.

  Lucy says, “I think I’m close to being done.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” she says, cocking her head, still looking down at her monitor. She clicks her mouse and we switch to the night-vision camera in Ryan’s room. “I’m getting these feelings of understanding them,” she says. She looks at me. “I knew she was going to say that about the bruise. I heard it in my head before she said it. I thought it.”

  I am quiet. We look at Ryan. He’s at peace when he sleeps. Lucy’s never put her project quite in these terms—in terms of understanding—before. Up front Dylan has music playing pretty loudly in his headphones and he’s writing away in his notebook. I tell Lucy about the Machine of Understanding Other People, and about what Dylan told me.

  “Did he say that?” she asks, and smiles a little.

  “Yes.”

  “That was my idea,” she says. “He’s using my stuff on you.” She laughs, but it sounds like she’s actually surprised, maybe a little hurt. If you’re an artist you’re supposed to get credit for the things you make up.

  “Yeah,” I say. “He is.”

  “I guess that’s what I’m doing,” she says, turning back to the monitor. She pans right and zooms. Ryan’s foot is twitching and she’s getting good video of it. “That’s my project.”

  Then, after a few seconds, she says, “It’s not because I hate him.”

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  “I don’t hate them,” she says. “For being normal people. And a normal family. I mean Ryan was going to be an insurance lawyer or something. So maybe you might think I’m doing this all because it’s okay that he’s gone. Because the world doesn’t need another insurance lawyer. Or because an insurance lawyer is not going to be the one who saves the world in the end.”

  “I don’t think that at all,” I say. “I’ve never once thought that.”

  “No, good,” she says, “because that’s not true.”

  “What are we—”

  “Dylan said that you said you thought I might be evil. Because of this project.”

  I let it sit for a few seconds. Then I say, “Why are we doing projects at all?”

  “To get our degrees.”

  “No,” I say. “I mean, like, why.”

  “I don’t know,” she says, shrugging. Of course she doesn’t like questions like this—they get broken on the metal inside of her. “Because we’re fucked-up weirdos who can’t work in offices? Or we’d die?”

  “We wouldn’t die.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t.” She looks over at the model in my lap. I look at it, too. I think it’s another way of saying that I’m twee. Things have gone sour. Again I can’t understand.

  On Sunday I go to church. I don’t know what kind it is. I dress extremely well and look better than I have in two years. I wear my green dress. I pay close attention to my cleavage as I stand in front of the mirror. I try eight different bras until I get it right.

  Suddenly there I am, sitting in a pew. Everyone stands up and sings from the book and I stand up with the book and move my mouth and pretend. I can feel the waxy lipstick smeared on my lips. So many sounds come out of us. We try to use our magic and tear open a portal that leads up to the center of the universe. We are attempting to speak to its core. We try for a few minutes, then sit down.

  After, I smoke cigarettes in my nice green dress, standing in the parking lot. I hold one leg at an angle, arched, and stare off in the distance. I am trying to make the people filing out of church believe I am a hooker, or was once a hooker but I decided that church could help reform me, so I came back. A few men watch me, I think, but I won’t turn to look at them. A few ladies, too. I keep smoking.

  Once they’re all are gone and I’m alone on the street, I drop my cigarette and I go back in and find the guy. I don’t know what he’s called—otherwise I’d use the word. He’s the guy with the white collar who led us.

  “Hi,” I say. “Can I confess?”

  “We don’t actually do that,” he says.

  “You don’t?”

  “No,” he says. “But we do talk.”

  Maybe it’s better to not tell him my made-up story about my old hooker-life.

  He asks me my name and I tell him that it’s Rose. He says it’s a nice name. I think it’s only fair to tell him that I believe nothing he believes.

  “That’s okay,” he says. “I don’t mind that.” He has a nice smile. He’s young, too. I try to imagine the path that leads here.

  “Did you grow up going to church, then?” he asks. We’re sitting next to one another in a pew. Just a half-hour ago he was standing up at the front, telling a story about salt. Now he’s turned into a person.

  “I just have a question, I think. We don’t have to talk about my history.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Shoot.”

  “Can you describe to me, very accurately, what it feels like to be lost?”

  He purses his lips and looks at the hymnbook in front of us. “Spiritually lost?” he says. One eyebrow goes up.

  “I guess.”

  “No,” he says. “I’ve never been spiritually lost.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

  “I’m supposed to have been,” he says. “I think. I don’t know, though. I just haven’t.”

  “I’m sure it’s okay that you haven’t,” I say. “It’s probably better. It probably makes you more confident. You have to be because you’re a leader.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “I think this one could really go either way.”

  He nods, then squints across the room. “Not all those who wander are lost,” he says. He’s still squinting. I wonder if he’s practiced this squint—a squint-stare off into the metaphysical distance. I’m realizing he’s kind of handsome. But then again, it might just be that he cares about something.

  “What is that?” I ask. “Did Jesus Christ say that?”

  “No,” he says. “Bilbo Baggins said that.”

  For example, Ryan Conrad’s dad, David Allen Conrad II, or the other question of Ryan Conrad, the question of why I love him, or how I love him, and how it’s not the same as Lucy. Then there is evil. Then there is Dylan, who I sometimes now smoke cigarettes with. Lucy doesn’t like that we have to break cover to go smoke but she won’t let us smoke in the van, so every two hours we’re allowed to slip out stealthily and go to the neighborhood park. We are there together the Monday after church and I ask Dylan if he told her about us.

  “No,” he says. “But maybe she knows. I think she wants it, anyway.” We’re on the swings.

  “Really?” I ask. “You two have always been you two.”

  “Rose, come on,” he says. He rocks himself a little by pressing his feet down. “She loves him,” he says. “That’s what this whole thing is. That’s her project.”

  I don’t want to talk more about this and so I ask him about his novel. He says it’s going well. He says he didn’t plan it, but it’s turning into a tale of redemption. The scientists who lost control of their carbonated beverage experiment have agreed to return to the Earth and try to save it.

  “So they accidentally turned all of the oceans into grape soda, and then the land itself is kinda this gummy worm stuff,” he says. “So far the people who are left—the people on the Moon, who live in a city on the Moon—they’ve had the scientists up in a kind of exhibit prison thing as a warning about hubris and techno
logy and all that. But the problem is that these guys are the only ones who might know how to reverse it. And one of them in the prison has this idea, and so all the scientists get excited because they think if they can return they might be able to save nature and bring all the animals back.”

  “Is it because they want to be heroes?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “They really do feel like they did a terrible thing. They want to get back to even.”

  “Is it going to work?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “If it works I think that might make you a Republican,” I say, and he laughs.

  “What’s the name of the city on the moon?”

  “Moonopolis,” he says.

  We’re quiet for another minute.

  “All politicians are nihilists,” he says.

  We smoke another cigarette and then go back to the van.

  I get a letter from the SSTD—my first one ever—asking me to come to the underground campus in East Chicago to meet with my advisor. It says her name is Eleanor Wright. I didn’t know I had an advisor. I call Dylan and Lucy and they both say they got the same letter, but they have different advisors and have meetings on different days. It’s nice outside. I make the ridiculous choice to ride my bike. It’s 27 miles. Lake Michigan, though, is an ocean to my left, and the greens are all coming. Dylan’s scientists haven’t managed to do all their evil yet.

  To get into the SSTD you have to enter through a bakery called Marvin’s. You have to say a secret word to Marvin. My letter says that today’s word is ANOREXIA and so inside the bakery, totally sweaty, I look at the man who must be Marvin and say, “Anorexia.”

  He says, “Well, you’ve come to the right place.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I say. “I mean that as the code word. I’m not suffering from it.”

  “I know that,” he says. “I was about to pull the lever that makes that wall of biscuits open.” He points at the wall of biscuits.

  “Sorry,” I say. “You know what you’re doing. I got confused.”

  “I do know what I’m doing,” he says. He pulls the lever and opens the wall of biscuits.

  I go down the secret elevator and down some secret hallways and get to the secret administrative offices.

  “Do you have an appointment?” the secretary asks. She looks like my aunt.

  I show her the letter. She smiles broadly. “Rose,” she says warmly. “It’s you. I’ve wondered what you look like in person.”

  “Yes,” I say. “It’s me.”

  “It is you,” she says. “Okay. Now. Let me see. You need Eleanor, and Eleanor said that you could meet her—” she checks a post-it note—“in the Glass Palace of Mystery.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “I’ll get you a map of the tunnels.”

  It takes me ten minutes of wandering down tunnels—tunnels that are actually just very clean, well-lit hallways—before I come to the doors that say GLASS PALACE OF MYSTERY. They’re not made out of glass. I try to push them open but they’re locked, so instead I knock. I see a button and I push it.

  Above me, a trapdoor opens, and confetti pours down onto my head.

  After a minute a woman opens the door. She’s a middle-aged woman with brown, frizzy hair. She’s wearing a yellow cardigan and a pair of glasses hangs around her neck, held in place by a stringy, silver cord. “Hello,” she says. “Rose?”

  “Eleanor?”

  “Yes,” she says. She looks at her watch. It’s half-melted. She nods, then looks at me. “You’re right on time. I appreciate that.”

  “It’s amazing that I am. I rode my bike. It took way longer than I thought.”

  “I wouldn’t call that amazing.”

  “It’s not amazing,” I say. “No. Sorry.”

  Eleanor nods again and opens the door wider. Behind her, I see the Glass Palace of Mystery. It’s one room, as large as an amphitheatre. The walls are all made of glass, or at least they’re all transparent. We’re 100 feet below the surface of Lake Michigan. Eleanor leads me further into the room and presses some buttons on a remote in her hand. Some lights go on, both inside the Glass Palace and outside, in the lake. A few strong white beams blaze out into the murk and gloom. They light up a pile of sludge and a pile of old tires.

  “It’s some of our best pollution to date,” Eleanor says. “By that I mean most toxic. We’ve been petitioning the power company to increase their superheated water output in order to encourage more extravagant changes in wildlife behavior. ”

  “I didn’t know I had an advisor,” I say to Eleanor.

  “And how is your project coming?” she asks.

  “I suck.”

  “The models?” Eleanor says. “Oh, I don’t know. I have to admit, part of me just loves the idea. We’ve had others here who have not been impressed. But I see what you mean by those. I really do see it.”

  “How do you know about them?” I haven’t come to campus once since my interview.

  “We watch,” Eleanor says, watching the sludge. “We watch all of you.”

  “So you’re like Santa Claus,” I say.

  Eleanor purses her lips, then puts both hands behind her back and strolls toward one of the glass walls. Her heels click against the glass floor. “You could drop out,” she says, “if you’d like. If you do really find your work...sucking.”

  “I don’t want to,” I say. “But I’m lost.”

  “That’s good!” she cries, turning, smiling. I doubt I look convinced, because she nods and says, “Really. For people like you that’s a very good sign.”

  “People like me?”

  “You know.”

  I don’t know what people like me are. I say nothing.

  “Boring people,” she says. “You’re boring, Rose.”

  “Oh.”

  “And you also don’t have very much talent.”

  “Oh.”

  She says, “I wouldn’t mind for you to expand some of your technical skills. In order to...deepen your work. All’s not lost. I’ve never cared much for talent. Think about scope. Scale.”

  “That’s interesting,” I say, “because my whole project is about scope and scale.”

  “I don’t think you understand your project.”

  “I think I have to quit,” I say.

  “Lucy,” says Eleanor, watching the tires now. There are a few fish down there, I see. They probably think that it’s coral. “Do you like what Lucy’s doing?”

  “Not really. Sometimes. I like Lucy better than what she’s doing.”

  “The Machine of Knowledge of Other People,” Eleanor says. “Such a fabulous title.” Eleanor nods to herself at the other end of the chamber, turns back to me and, walking toward me, says, “I feel good about what I’ve seen here today. You pass. Carry on.”

  “What about quitting?” I say. “Also, I’m lost.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she says. “At this point.”

  The next night I ask Lucy to come over to my apartment instead of sitting in the van with Dylan. I don’t think she’ll want to, but on the phone she says, “Okay. Dylan’s being really weird, anyway.”

  I have started working on a new model. It’s a model of the three of us sitting in the van.

  When Lucy comes in I show it to her and she says, “Less twee, I guess. You could be doing so much more.”

  “Like what?” I say.

  “You need to break through,” she says, “all your sentimentality and wonderment.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just better.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just better.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just better.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just better.”

  “I think if I did that there wouldn’t be anything inside of me to talk about.”

  “Well,” she says, flopping down onto my green cat-shredded recliner, “there you go.”

  My biggest model of a
father and a son constructing the solar system takes up most of the kitchen, so to make tea I’m constantly stepping over Jupiter and having to hug the father as I go around him. “You suck sometimes,” I say to her. My kitchen has an opening for the breakfast countertop. She doesn’t react at all. “Do you realize you’re mean?” Again, nothing.

  When I give her her tea she says, “I’m sorry. I barely know what twee means.”

  “I hardly even know.”

  “You know the thing with Dylan?” she says.

  “What?”

  “He has this whole spacey art genius vibe and I’m pretty sure he’s totally full of shit.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “He told me he didn’t love me anymore. He said he was starting to think that love was invented, anyway.” She sips at her tea and looks down at it. “What sucks is I think I said the same thing to him like two years ago. Now he thinks he’s the one who thought of it. Again. And that he’s, like, the first person who ever thought of it.”

  “Do you actually think that’s true?” I ask.

  “About love?”

  I nod.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says, and smiles. “It doesn’t matter at all, who invented what. It’s there either way, right?”

  Once, Ryan Conrad’s dad almost found spycam 8. It’s the one in Ryan’s bathroom, where Lucy gets her footage of Ryan’s mom bathing him. Ryan’s dad was in the room, in a suit, chatting to them both during a bath. (He has a way of chatting with Ryan that must be how he used to chat with Ryan—no difference.) But as he spoke he kept staring right at the camera, which we’d mounted inside the heating vent when the Conrads were on vacation. We thought he was about to stop talking completely, open the vent, and find it. In the end we had Dylan go into the backyard and light their compost on fire to distract them.