The Universe in Miniature in Miniature Page 8

“No,” I said. “Do you?”

  “What about, like, breathing? Or heartbeats? Something about all the systems.”

  “What about plants?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, and snapped a little. Then she frowned. She was wearing a bright yellow shirt with a tie at the ribs, the kind of first-day item that could make or break an entire year for somebody. I thought it would make her. It made her new big boobs look like binary stars.

  “What about something having to do with energy?” I said. “You know? Like something that uses energy is alive.”

  “That’s really good, Courtney,” she said, nodding. “Let’s use that.”

  I looked down at my hands. “Okay.”

  We did. When I said it he nodded, then said, “Okay, Courtney. What about a car?”

  “What about a car?”

  “It uses energy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But it’s a car. It’s not natural.”

  “So something has to be natural to be alive?”

  “I think so,” I said, but already I was starting to feel the sinking feeling I sometimes felt in school, when I talked too much and realized, as I spoke, that I knew, honestly, nothing. Usually I wouldn’t have said anything, just to keep this exact thing from happening.

  “What do you mean by natural?” he asked. My heart now was beating faster and I could feel my cheeks turning red. I realized he wasn’t going to stop. “What would you say about a clone? Or a baby born from artificial insemination?”

  “I would call those natural.” Now I was just answering.

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re based on things—processes?—that already existed. That evolved.”

  “Okay, so that’s a new idea,” he said. He looked like he might go to the chalkboard and write it, which gave me a quick thrill, but he decided not to, and turned again, looking down, nodding, thinking.

  “Life is something that has evolved over time. Now that might work for a broader definition of life, life in the abstract, but it still doesn’t help us situationally. Say we’re both looking at a motorcycle.” He looked up. “It’s evolved, hasn’t it? Over the course of generations, different designers have changed it and improved its design. No? So can you tell me a definitive reason that it’s not alive?”

  “Because it’s made out of metal?”

  “Your blood has iron in it.”

  “All those things you just said, though,” I said. “Those were people changing it.”

  “Yes, but I’m not so sure that matters for the analogy. Let’s set that aside. Any other reasons?”

  Silence. Everyone staring. In my mind I saw the motorcycle parked on the street in front of my father’s apartment complex. I imagined him walking toward it, wearing some kind of leather suit, a big helmet under his arm. Somewhere there was a fire decal.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and smiled. “No. I guess I just don’t know.”

  I loved him by October. There was never a moment or a comment, a time his hand brushed my wrist as we all engaged our Bunsen burners. It just happened. It was when I focused on him that the future seemed the biggest, the most real, the most open. My brain felt big. I was never the smart student, but it was as though, from that first day, I had simply decided to set that aside in the same way we had set my argument about evolution aside; suddenly I could do the work. I had never mattered more.

  I knew about the love because of my showers in the morning, when I would still be half-asleep, the water coming down over my face, and I would already be thinking about him as I crawled to life. I had had four boyfriends, three if you didn’t count a summer hookup with my cousin’s friend Phillip from Phoenix, who had come to stay for three weeks and who had talked, a lot, about websites. He had once gotten me alone in my bedroom and had sat on the bed and had said, “I’m interested in romantic”—he touched my hand—“relationships.” That was the end.

  The other three, the real boyfriends, had come and gone like thunderstorms. They were based on awkward touching, fear, and sex in the dark guest bedrooms of absent parents’ homes. I would see these boyfriends—acne-ridden farm kids, really—in the halls, and it was like I didn’t know them, that we had never met, that none of us were even there.

  In the shower, Mr. Carpenter would come into my mind and ask questions about science. Sometimes they were hard questions that gave me that same feeling I’d felt on the first day of class, embarrassed but excited, too, about what it was possible to think about. To me already he seemed like he might be a failed intellectual, someone who had been forced to settle for high school teaching, even though he’d once aspired to something more, like wildlife fieldwork in an unspecified jungle, and his failure made him all the more tragic and beautiful. I had no reason to believe this, but I had invented facts about him, and I thought I saw it in the way that he walked in front of the chalkboard, I thought I heard it in his disdain for college, and his disdain for the AP test we were working toward. That being smart was something you found when you were alone. He told us that being smart was being able to destroy things as much as it was to make things. And to know which things deserved to be destroyed and which things deserved to keep existing.

  In the shower he would also approach me physically. This was much less abstract. It was my mother’s shower, the same shower I had used since I was five, when my parents and I first moved in to the house. There was the ornamental tile with the peacock on it, there was the same suction-cupped shampoo station behind the showerhead. There was Mr. Carpenter. In those first weeks, he would be wearing his swimsuit when he entered the shower, as though even my imagination was unhappy with me, and would still not let me go past PG-13. He would kiss me, and then we would shampoo each others’ hair.

  “How is your father?” my mom asked me, after one of these October showers. “Is he still dating that woman?”

  “I think so,” I told her. “I haven’t seen her in a couple of weeks. He hasn’t said anything.”

  “It certainly didn’t take him long,” she said.

  “I thought you guys mutually agreed to get a divorce, though.”

  “I can still observe that it didn’t take him long, can’t I?”

  “You can do whatever you want,” I told her. I was tired of navigating her brain and heart both. She had had trouble dating. She had tried, even though she’d also tried to keep it from me. One night I had looked out the window and had seen her being dropped off by someone in a red SUV. I had seen what I thought was a goodnight kiss, but I had also seen her storm out of the huge truck and climb down and slam the door. I watched her stomp her way across the driveway in her heels as the truck slowly, weirdly reversed away, like a fat alpha seal sliding backwards, into the ocean, having already eaten its yabbie lobster.

  “Is he eating?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “He stopped eating completely.”

  “He was always very good at making pancakes,” she said. “At least he can make those.”

  “He eats stones now. He crushes them in his mortar and pestle and makes shakes with them.”

  “Now you’re just being funny,” said Mom.

  I got to class a minute late, and when I came through the door, Mr. Carpenter glanced over and said, “Oh, Courtney. We’re just talking about something new here.”

  I went to my lab table and sat down next to Holly and saw what he’d written on the board: Krueger Sport Game Park.

  “What is it?” I asked Holly. Mr. Carpenter was talking about elk.

  “It’s that place between here and Carbondale,” she said. “Out in the middle of nowhere. Where those hunters can come on vacation.”

  “—in our county,” Mr. Carpenter said. “Which means tax dollars, which means less ethics, period. Which complicates things even more.”

  Mr. Carpenter continued to speak about the Krueger Game Park, and as he explained it, I remembered its existence, and people talking about it when it first opened. It was a place you could go to hunt exotic game without re
ally having to hunt. It was a preserve, stocked with deer and elk and antelope and rams and wild boar, so many that it was impossible not to run into something shootable after only ten minutes of strolling. Mr. Carpenter then rolled the television into the room and turned out the lights. I remembered some of the video from the news, years before. A PETA person had snuck in and made the tape. It showed an employee herding deer toward a guest, using a pickup truck to scare them and run them into a trap. Then a man stood up from behind some bushes and started shooting a machine gun. The video was grainy and shaky, and it felt like we were watching porn. The bullets tore into the deer and ripped one line of holes in its side, all in a perfect row, as though someone had glued red sequins from its hindquarters to its chest.

  “Gross,” Holly said. She had a huge open-mouthed frown on her face. I could see that everyone’s shoulders, even in the dark, were tensed up. When the movie was over, Mr. Carpenter hit the lights and turned off the TV.

  “What’s wrong with this?” he asked.

  “It’s like the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen in my life?” Holly said, half-raising her hand.

  “Because it’s a video of people hunting? Isn’t hunting a part of our collective history? Isn’t it where our history is? Aren’t we omnivores?”

  “Dudes have like bazookas,” said Nick Wesley, a baseball player who sat to the right of us. Holly liked him. I thought he liked her, too. I looked at him and wondered whether he was making the argument out of love for her, or real outrage at the video. I could see how sometimes it could be difficult to keep those things apart, love and thinking. I could also see Nick Wesley blowing deer away with a machine gun.

  “So if it were to be more sporting,” said Mr. Carpenter, “if it were to seem as though the deer had a chance to escape, this would be, what, less unethical?”

  “Totally,” said Nick, and that’s when I saw him glance over to us, to Holly. He looked back at Mr. Carpenter. “I mean my dad hunts. I’ve gone with him. It’s no big deal, I’m not saying I’m like for Bambi and against everyone who kills Bambi. But these guys don’t have to do anything, they don’t have to know anything at all. That’s why it sucks. It’s like fishing in one of those stocked ponds at boat shows. It’s like what’s wrong with you that you’re such an idiot that you think you did something good when you catch one?”

  Our project for that week was to all write a letter to the county, expressing our outrage with Krueger. There was a county policy meeting open to the public coming up in a few weeks, and he urged us to attend, and to speak out against Krueger. Mr. Carpenter told us that part of biology was necessarily activism. He told us that it wasn’t science anymore, but it didn’t matter. He told us that the world we lived in made it that way.

  The first time we were alone together was a few weeks later, for student-teacher conferences. It wasn’t supposed to be just me—it was supposed to be Holly and me together, but she was sick. We needed to talk to him about our plant experiment. More specifically, to talk to him about why all our plants were dead.

  His office was back behind the lab. It had big glass windows, books in shelves, and lots of pictures. There were a few on the wall of him next to his kayak, sitting on the rocks in the sun. There was one of him in the rapids. He also had a computer that looked like an Atari.

  “This kind of thing just happens sometimes,” he said. “Don’t sweat it too bad. I’m not going to flunk you. You can’t control it.” He seemed distracted, and he read some of our lab report draft. We were looking at our dead plants, ten of them, each in its own Styrofoam container, curled over and brown. Holly and I had overwatered.

  He turned his big brown eyes right to me, and I froze.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  He sounded like my dad. Maybe he isn’t twenty-eight, I thought. Maybe he’s more like thirty-five.

  I smiled too much. “You mean, like, change the experiment?”

  “No,” he said. “I just mean finding a way to use what you have here. Were you measuring your water? How good were your notes along the way?”

  He gave me some ideas and I copied them down into my notebook. A list with bullet points on my college-ruled paper. I nodded as though I heard anything he said.

  When we were through talking about the plants, he asked me how everything was going in class, and I told him fine. Then he said, looking down into his grade book, “You’re doing well. Codominance. Tough the first time you see it. And I know that Holly is benefiting from being next to you, too. I appreciate that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re good at this,” he said, leaning back into his chair, closing the book. “You should keep doing this. Are you interested in the sciences? For a career?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I haven’t decided yet, I guess.”

  “The good thing is that you don’t have to for a long time,” he said. “I didn’t decide to be a teacher until a few years ago. I did a lot after college.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know,” he said. “Circus.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Just a lot of things I’d been wanting to do.”

  “Like that?” I asked, and pointed to the picture of the kayak.

  “Like that.”

  He warmed up. We talked for what even I could tell was an inappropriate amount of time. And he said things.

  That day I ran. It was cool outside, and I went east, down the road Krueger was on. It was too far away, and I knew I wouldn’t get to it, but I went anyway, pulled by the force of the straight line that led to the thing he cared about so much. I fell into the stable place where my legs stopped burning as much and I thought of what he had told me about his time as a guide on whitewater trips. In Idaho once, he told me, one night with his friends, between chartered trips, he’d been drinking, and they were camped on a small island. They needed wood, and there wasn’t any, and so he’d gone through the dark to his kayak, paddled to shore, found wood, and had then started paddling back to the island. No life jacket, no light, no skirt on the kayak. Somewhere in the middle of the river, he said, he got pulled into a current, and before he could react, he was heading downstream, pile of wood in his lap, unable to do much in the way of paddling. It was just as he dumped the wood over the side that his kayak dropped down into a hole. The bow hit a rock that jolted him forward, and then he was underwater, upside down, his legs still in the kayak, pinned against a vertical stone by a thousand pounds of river force. I asked him if he panicked and he said that he had, but that it didn’t make a difference, because he could hardly move. But he said then, after he struggled for a few seconds, and after the feelings passed through his mind, he suddenly became extra-rational. He thought: I have two minutes. I refuse to die, here, like this. And so underwater, the current still mashing him sideways, he managed to plant his paddle between the rock and the kayak, and then slowly, hand over hand, pull his legs from the boat and slither around the side, then crawl, inches at a time, up the length of the long rod. The kayak was pinned so forcefully against the rock that it didn’t even budge as he moved. “Imagine trying to free-climb up a cliff with a person on your back,” he said, and I did, I imagined it. Being stuck.

  After seeing it in my mind a number of times, and trying, over and over again, to feel what it must have felt like for those first moments underwater, my running slowed down, and I came to a gas station.

  I realized I was at the edge of Preston, the next town down, and that I had run nine miles.

  I was exhausted. Instead of running home, through the night, I called my mom to pick me up, told her that I’d gone way too far, and then drank a Sprite as I sat on the picnic bench and waited.

  “How is your mother?” my dad asked me the week before Halloween. It was a Thursday evening. I was about to go to the town hall meeting, the one Mr. Carpenter had asked us to attend. We were having dinner. Fish sticks. “I haven’t seen many emails from her lately.”

  He held a fish stick like
a cigar, thoughtfully, and then started dipping it into some ketchup with way too much enthusiasm.

  “She’s fine,” I said. “Why don’t you just call her if you want to talk to her?”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “We prefer to use email.”

  My parents both talked about email as though they were not only the first people in America to find out about it, but as though they perhaps had invented it themselves. Neither of them seemed to have any memory of my brother James sitting down with them for hours at a time in front of the computer, trying to explain what it meant to log on to something. I can remember James sitting at the desk, head down, mentally drained and defeated, and both of them sitting in chairs behind him, leaning forward, glasses on, taking notes.

  “So what’s this meeting tonight?” he asked. “Is that a new sweater?”

  “I told you,” I said. “Krueger. The Community Center.”

  “Right,” he said. “You’re in a saving the planet phase now.”

  “It’s not a phase,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, smiling. He put his hands up defensively. “I’m joking.” He reached for a new fish stick, then stopped himself before eating it. “But actually it probably is a phase,” he said after a moment of reflection. “I’ve seen you go through them. I’ve been here for as long as you’ve been here.”

  “You mean on the planet Earth?”

  “Cort,” he said. “Do you not remember when you were a historian? And then when you were a writer? And then when you were a potter?”

  One of my pots was on the shelf above my dad’s head.

  “I have interests.”

  “I know, honey,” he said. He could see how mad I was. “I’m sorry.”

  I walked to the Community Center instead of letting him give me a ride. It was a nice crisp October night. I walked past Dalton’s, the grocery store where I’d worked. I’d quit just before the start of school. I wanted As, not Cs. I wanted to be the person the teacher thanked in private, not the one he asked other people to help, not the one riding her bike to the store after school, only to be hypnotized by the beep of the machine and the tit-stares of old men buying peanuts. I didn’t miss it at all. When I looked at its blue awning I thought about all of the other kids inside, enslaved, mopping and sweeping and facing up cans of tomato paste.