The Universe in Miniature in Miniature Read online

  Still, it has to stop. There’s something wrong. Maybe, I think, it’s my project. To stop Lucy’s.

  First I go looking for Dylan to tell him he might be the worst of all of us.

  He’s not at his apartment. I find him at the coffee shop, drinking a mug of hot water.

  “It’s something new I’m trying,” he says. “Just water. Ever since I turned the oceans to soda in the novel I’ve been having these weird feelings about water.”

  “I want to talk for real,” I say. “Just let me get a triple cappuccino.”

  When I’m waiting in line I plan out what I want to say. It’s something along these lines: we think we’re different and we think we’re special, the three of us, but we’re not. We really have no idea. We’re all like Ryan Conrad. Everyone is like Ryan Conrad.

  When I sit down, Dylan says, “So I finished the book and sold it for $750,000.”

  I stare at him.

  “It also got optioned for a movie. So I’m rich.”

  “Dylan.”

  “What?”

  “The scientists,” I say. “What happens to the scientists?”

  “What?” he asks. “In the book? They go back to Earth with their idea.”

  “Does it work? Do they reverse it?”

  “I’m not telling,” Dylan says. “I actually can’t. I don’t own the story anymore. They own it.”

  “I don’t think that was the point of the project,” I say, “when you were doing the project.”

  “I’m moving to New York. Next week.”

  I leave the coffee shop and take my triple cappuccino and my saucer with me.

  That night I dream I am Lucy. I dream I am at my high school homecoming dance. Across the gym I see Ryan Conrad with his date. Her name is Jenna Fitzcarmichaelsimmonson, she is blond, and Ryan smiles at her as he hands her a plastic cup of fruit punch. As Lucy, I am hurt to see this because we are not allowed to talk about our strange dates dressed as adults or the dances we tried to do in his uncle’s living room. It’s not because our love would be taboo or impossible—no one cares about us. We could do it. It’s because somehow we decided on this game and we never realized we didn’t have to stay in the game. I become a wise older Lucy inside of the gym inside of my brain while I sleep. I look at him, thirty feet away, and realize that all along, one of the only true and good things in the world was right here, alive and well, right beneath the basketball hoop. It was just simple love and a good, clear connection between the minds of two people. And I couldn’t tell because I was too young.

  I don’t know if Lucy knows when I go to Yellow Oak Lane. The van is there and the felt is in the windows. It’s very conspicuous. Nobody has said a thing.

  I am standing on the sidewalk at the end of the block, staking out the stake-out van, when I see Lucy climb out of the side door. She sneaks across the street and climbs through a window on the first floor of the Conrad’s house.

  I stand still for a second, unsure what to do. Then I go to the van.

  Lucy’s laptop is on the utility bench, and I don’t have to do anything to find her—as I’m sitting down she’s slipping into Ryan’s bedroom. The night-vision is on, and so when I see her she is green. Her hoodie is up and tightened, so her skin is a pale yellow-green circle, and the colors make me think that I’m not looking at a bedroom through a night-vision camera, but I’m looking at the Underworld, and that Lucy has snuck down through the caves, looking for him, and she has finally entered the cavern where he is staying. She has turned into a corpse to find him, but it was worth it. Her eyes are white. She stands in front of the door.

  Slowly, she closes it behind her, so softly that the bars don’t even jump on the audio.

  Ryan is asleep. Or, if this is the cavern in the Underworld, he is gone.

  Lucy goes across the room and kneels beside him.

  For a long time she is still, just watching his face. I have imagined before that this, here—Ryan asleep—is as close as he gets to being what he was before. Lucy and I have seen both parents watching him and I’ve suspected they were thinking the same thing. We’ve seen both parents crying. And what does Ryan Conrad dream about? What can be inside of him? This, Lucy can’t know. I can’t know either, but I have guessed, and I think she’s guessed, too, even though she would pretend she hasn’t.

  My guess is this: inside of Ryan Conrad Ryan Conrad looks up at the world and all it used to be from the bottom of a well. There’s only a small circle of light. Faces pass over it and he sees them and his heart changes. The color of the water he is sitting in changes, too. He reaches out for the faces and he can’t reach them.

  There is a tremor of movement in the low-res green light. Lucy’s arm is moving.

  She touches Ryan Conrad’s hair. She strokes it once, tilts her head, leans forward, and kisses his lips.

  I get a postcard from Dylan a few weeks later—he says that he found a place to live and he tells me I should move out and live with him for a few months. He says he has a cat, and he says he lives in a place called Carroll Gardens, and when I read the words I imagine that all the characters from Alice in Wonderland live on his block.

  He says in a P.S. that he found out he was allowed to tell me that his scientists do manage to save the world after all. It is a happy ending. One of them lost an arm. But beyond that, it worked.

  I write Dylan back on a piece of toilet paper and tell him that he’s missed only a little, but that we haven’t missed him. I tell him I’m glad his scientists found redemption and saved the Earth and reversed the effects of their former selfish acts and I tell him that I don’t think he is Republican just because he wrote a story with a happy ending. I paint the toilet paper in liquid plastic and attach one of my little AA-powered lights to the top and set it out to dry on some newspaper.

  That night, I was waiting in the van when Lucy came back. I was crying and she said, “Please don’t,” to me, but maybe she was, too, or had been. Then she went to the laptop and loaded eighteen files and showed me all the times she had snuck in to kiss Ryan Conrad. We watched them in silence. When we were finished I said, “I think your project has to be done.”

  She was quiet.

  “Lucy.”

  “Do you know what I thought?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “I thought that if the right person kissed him, he might wake up.”

  “He never did.”

  “No,” she said. “Of course he never did.”

  We each have a new project. Lucy’s is already done. For her project we removed every single spycam and microphone from the Conrad house and we left no trace. We did it on Memorial Day, when the Conrads were away in Oak Park. We erased all her files. We threw away the gear. We left the van in an alley. We had never been there.

  My project is more complicated. At first I just said little things to Lucy and didn’t follow them up, but I have now decided it’s time for the hard sell and I tell her directly, while we’re eating pasta, that she has to go see him at his day-clinic.

  She doesn’t ask me why I think she should. She just finishes her sandwich and wipes her face with her napkin and says, “Will you come?”

  And everything else is as you’d expect it might be. His mother is there but his dad is not. When we get there lunch has just ended, and other head trauma patients are spread out across the room. Some of them are with their mothers, too. Lucy is dressed in nicer clothes but she’s not in formal wear. I stand back as she goes to talk to Ryan’s mom—I am holding a reasonably-sized model of a boy and his father making the solar system for a gift because I think there’s a good chance that Ryan and his dad maybe really did do it a long time ago. So I will give it to them. When Lucy talks to Ryan’s mom I imagine she is saying simple, clear, true things, like, “I used to know Ryan,” or, “We were friends ten years ago. I’ve been meaning to come see him but I didn’t know what was the right thing to do.” Whatever she says, Ryan’s mom seems warm and happy and they sit down in front of Ryan. Rya
n’s mom talks and gestures; Ryan’s eyes are empty, his head is tilted. His hair is cut well but his face isn’t right. Maybe there is nothing inside of him at all anymore. It’s too hard to imagine what there is inside of him.

  Instead I imagine Lucy, what she thinks. She thinks that in another universe, one of the many that has split off from ours, Ryan’s foot slid and he reached out and grabbed her shoulder and they laughed heartily together. They laughed about how close he’d come to falling. Then they went on with their lives.

  Here is Ryan, gone from the world, he won’t be waking up, and nothing, I really mean nothing, is irreversible.

  No Sun

  On the morning of the third day I walked through the dark streets of our home town, Grayson—the government had already turned off the grid—to my uncle’s offices, which were on the second floor of a corner building on Jackson and Naismith, right above the hardware store. I knew that Uncle Drake, when he first moved to Grayson, had intentionally chosen the spot to make a statement: beneath the theoretical, even with buildings, there must always be the practical to enforce it. The hardware store below was action. He, the man above, was mind.

  There was no one else around as I made this small journey. There were no clouds, many stars, no cars, an eerie calm. It hadn’t gotten cold yet. I could hear that Fallon’s still had drinking customers and a few houses had candlelight in the windows, but despite the disembodied voices and other small signs of activity, it was difficult to imagine people inside structures, still living. Not because a wave of destructive force had rocked through the community and killed us all—this hadn’t happened yet, clearly—but because, since that first morning, a feeling of incredible doom had overwhelmed me, and I was having trouble believing in the existence of life.

  Sara was still alive. It was the first time I’d been away from her in 72 hours. And it had become obvious that she was essential, that she would be essential, if there was going to be any kind of future for us.

  This morning I had left her more for her sake than out of any compulsion to get away from her. Of the two of us, she was the one who liked to be alone, and I had begun to see the same fidgeting and irritability that meant she needed two hours to gather herself amidst her introverted rituals, developed over a lifetime of quiet moments within her own mind, without me wandering around the house, making noises, planning, asking her questions about her allergies.

  She was faced with the prospect of never being apart from me again. We had been dating for five weeks. She was scared.

  Finally she’d said, “Can you please go find…something?” Understandable. So I left.

  I had been worried about looters since the darkness started; it now made me anxious that she was in my house alone, but the town, amazingly, was still quiet. Probably because we had no television, and could not see images of the other side of the planet, which we’d heard was on fire.

  “Good morning, Joe,” said Uncle Drake, after he’d pulled open the door. “Although there is no longer such a thing.” He was actually smiling.

  “My watch is still running,” I said, and held up my wrist to show him. “So it’s morning, Doc.”

  “Eh,” he said, shrugging, and he moved out of the way.

  I entered his offices and he closed the door behind me. I let him take my coat. He was running a generator; I could hear it grinding away in some other room. How fruitless it seemed. Still, his consumption of electricity was modest, only a lamp at his desk and a small tape recorder, the old flat kind, playing some soft classical music that I thought might be either Erik Satie or the soundtrack to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

  “Curious tattoo on your wrist,” he said. “What is it?”

  I looked at it. “It’s the sun,” I said. I watched him nod appreciatively. Considering the circumstances.

  “It’s a coincidence,” I said. “Don’t start pontificating.”

  “Come again?”

  “I thought it was cool at the time,” I said, even though this was not true. “It’s not like I knew this was coming.”

  “The sun is not cool.”

  “Not what I meant.”

  “Would you like some tea?” he asked, and I was glad we were dropping the subject.

  I nodded yes, and he went into the kitchen. I sat down on his sofa. This, exactly, is what I wanted. A conversation before Sara and I left. Some advice, maybe. He was the smartest person I knew, and as I am not a smart person—book-smart person—I’d always found it a good idea to talk to such people in times of crisis. He had been a physicist at the U. of C. for 25 years before moving up from Chicago; he’d arrived quietly, relocating the hundred miles to Grayson, and now it seemed that he’d come just for this, to be our personal interpreter for the end of the universe. He had no family but me and did nothing but sit in his offices, reading, working out old paradoxes to keep himself busy. Sometimes he strolled.

  I’d last seen him late into the first day, during what should have been dusk. He had been in the library, speaking at a lectern in front of an impromptu crowd of maybe 150 people. He had been trying to explain—no, not explain, just describe, since explanations, as such, were no longer possible—the physics of what had happened, but in the end I think his lecture upset people, which was impressive, because people were already so upset. There were some screams. I saw a lady push her husband and storm out. All they had wanted to know was when normalcy was going to start again, and he hadn’t been able to say a thing on that topic. Deep down I could tell my uncle didn’t think it would ever return. Oh, and this: the deceleration was still going on, and Uncle Drake had been pressed forward into his lectern as he spoke, as though the whole library had been built on a slope. At one point his glasses had fallen forward, horizontally, from his face.

  “I’ve been thinking about time,” he said now, coming across the apartment with a silver tray. “Your watch reminds me.” He wasn’t European—actually, he was from Michigan, like my dad—but he behaved like he was. Or tried to. He had a small white beard on the tip of his chin and a mustache that curved around his lips to greet it. It had been intense back when I was little; now it was extraordinary. His hair was white, too. For some time I had been convinced that it was dyed, and that he was intentionally cultivating the image of a batshit crazy theoretical physicist in order to impress the whole town. Now, given the situation, I wondered to myself whether it was possible that being a physicist actually made your hair turn white and gave you a hint of a German accent.

  I looked at my tattoo.

  “What about time?” I said.

  “It’s all gravity,” he said, flipping his left hand casually—time, how annoying—as he dipped the tea with his right. “Our whole feeling for it.” He looked up. “Of course we ourselves participate as well. But now, I don’t know what will happen with it.”

  “I don’t really—”

  “I woke up with an image in my head,” he said, “of every person in town frozen. Not by ice but in time.”

  I nodded, then leaned forward and took my own small cup of tea. “Sure,” I said, stirring in my sugar. “Wait, what?”

  “If this happened, Joseph,” he went on, “would we know?” He stared over my head. “If our movements were slower, and our metabolisms and synapses slowed down as well, does it seem possible to you that no one would know the difference? That the course of human civilization would continue on at this new rate? Perhaps our understanding of nature would change, but we would call that a phenomenon of nature, not of us.”

  I felt afraid imagining this, and I moved my neck a little to verify the speed of everyday life. I started to wish I hadn’t come to see him at all. “I guess it would take someone who wasn’t slowing down,” I said, “to be able to see it.”

  “This is not relevant to our current situation. Gravity is still more or less intact,” he noted gravely, moving on. “Something that behaves like gravity, at least.”

  So I had happened into a larger conversation he was having with himself. I though
t then he might demonstrate his comment about gravity by dropping something, but he didn’t need to, since we weren’t floating in the middle of the room. So he didn’t.

  “Listen, Uncle D,” I said. “Have you figured out anything new?”

  He talked then for some time about his guesses as to who would go first, the hot side of the planet or us, the cold side. Each side had its merits. He guessed that Africa was dying the fastest, that the temperatures could possibly be 130 or 140 degrees by now, the continent baking as it was beneath permanent sunlight. Europe and Asia were probably not doing much better.

  “But then again we’ve lost photosynthesis,” he said. “And energy. The scales of the geological systems are out of balance. The weather will be coming soon. That will probably kill us all before any of the more interesting questions are answered.”

  “Sara and I are going to go up to my dad’s old cabin.”

  “Oh? I vaguely remember something about that. Where is it?”

  “It’s in the Porkies. It’s way up in the U.P.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said again, and shrugged, just like he had when I came in. “I will not be joining you. Fools rush out.”

  “I know,” I said, and sipped at my tea. I would have invited him, actually. It would have been okay to have him.

  We sipped a little more.

  “I’m going to kill myself,” he said.

  I could have had a strong reaction to this, but it had already started to happen around town, and he was by no means the first with the idea. The entire Funderburk family had eaten rat poison, and no one had seen the mayor since he left to “look into things” in Milwaukee. I didn’t doubt Drake’s will to do it. But I had one question, and it was at the core of what energy I had left, at the core of going north with Sara.