Turtles All the Way Down

"I do." I was staring at the frozen movie screen, waiting for him to un-pause it. "I overheard you talking to Noah."

  I could still feel his spit in my mouth, and the respite the hand sanitizer had provided was dwindling away. If I could still feel his spit, it was probably still in there. You might need to drink more of it. This is ridiculous. Billions of people kiss, and nothing bad happens to them. You know you'll feel better if you drink more.

  "He needs to see somebody," I said. "A psychologist or something."

  "He needs a father."

  Why did you even try to kiss him? You should've known. You could've had a normal night, but you chose this. Right now needs to be about Noah, not me. His bacteria are swimming in you. They're on your tongue right now. Even pure alcohol can't kill them all.

  "Do you just want to watch the movie?"

  I nodded, and we sat next to each other, close but not touching, for the next hour, as the spiral tightened.

  FIFTEEN

  AFTER I GOT HOME THAT NIGHT, I went to bed but not to sleep. I kept starting texts to him and then not sending them, until finally I put the phone down and took my laptop out. I was wondering what had happened to Davis's online life--where he'd gone once he shut down his social media profiles.

  The google hits related to Davis were overwhelmingly about his father--"Pickett Engineering CEO Reveals in Interview He Won't Leave a Dime to His Teenage Children," etc. Davis hadn't updated his Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or blog since the disappearance, and searches for his two usernames, dallgoodman and davisnotdave02, turned up only links to other people.

  So I started looking for similar usernames: dallgoodman02, davisnotdave, davisnotdavid, then guessing at Facebook and blog URLs. And then after more than an hour, just after midnight, it finally occurred to me to search for the phrase, "the leaves are gone you should be, too."

  A single link came up, to a blog with the username isnotid02. The site had been created two months earlier, and like Davis's previous journal, most of the entries began with a quote from someone else and then concluded with a short, cryptic essay. But this site also had a tab called poems. I clicked over to the journal and scrolled down until I reached the first entry:

  "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on."

  --ROBERT FROST

  Fourteen days since the mess began. My life isn't worse, exactly--just smaller. Look up long enough and you start to feel your infinitesimality. The difference between alive and not--that's something. But from where the stars are watching, there is almost no difference between varieties of alive, between me and the newly mown grass I'm lying on right now. We are both astonishments, the closest thing in the known universe to a miracle.

  "And then a Plank in Reason, broke / And I dropped down, and down--"

  --EMILY DICKINSON

  There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way--one for every person who ever lived, more or less. I was thinking about that beneath the sky tonight, unseasonably warm, as good a showing of stars as one gets around here. Something about looking up always makes me feel like I'm falling.

  Earlier, I heard my brother crying in his room, and I stood next to the door for a long time, and I know he knew I was there because he tried to stop sobbing when the floorboards creaked under my footstep, and I just stood out there for the longest time, staring at his door, unable to open it.

  "Even the silence / has a story to tell you."

  --JACQUELINE WOODSON

  The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.

  "The world is a globe--the farther you sail, the closer to home you are."

  --TERRY PRATCHETT

  Sometimes I open Google Maps and zoom in on random places where he might be. S came by last night to walk us through what happens now--what happens if he's found, what happens if he's not--and at one point he said, "You understand that I'm referring now not to the physical person but to the legal entity." The legal entity is what hovers over us, haunting our home. The physical person is in that map somewhere.

  "I am in love with the world."

  --MAURICE SENDAK

  We always say that we are beneath the stars. We aren't, of course--there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human--we are whos, other animals are thats--but English puts us beneath the stars, at least.

  Eventually, a she showed up.

  "What's past is prologue."

  --WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Seeing your past--or a person from your past--can for me at least be physically painful. I'm overwhelmed by a melancholic ache--and I want the past back, no matter the cost. It doesn't matter that it won't come back, that it never even actually existed as I remember it--I want it back. I want things to be like they were, or like I remember them having been: Whole. But she doesn't remind me of the past, for some reason. She feels present tense.

  The next entry was posted late the night he'd given me the money, and more or less confirmed that the she was me.

  "Awake, dear heart, awake. Thou hast slept well. Awake."

  --WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  I wonder if I fucked it up. But if I hadn't done it, I'd have wondered something else. Life is a series of choices between wonders.

  "The isle is full of noises."

  --WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  The thought, would she like me if I weren't me, is an impossible thought. It folds in upon itself. But what I mean is would she like me if the same body and soul were transported into a different life, a lesser life? But then, of course, I wouldn't be me. I would be someone else. The past is a snare that has already caught you. A nightmare, Dedalus said, from which I am trying to awake.

  And then the most recent entry:

  "This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine."

  --WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.

  It was only after reading every journal entry that I noticed the ones about me began with quotes from The Tempest. I felt like I was invading his privacy, but it was a public blog, and spending time with his writing felt like spending time with him, only not as scary. So I clicked over to the poems section.

  The first one went:

  My mother's footsteps

  Were so quiet

  I barely heard her leave.

  Another:

  You must never let truth get in the way of beauty,

  Or so e. e. cummings believed.

  "This is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart,"

  He wrote of love and longing.

  That often got him laid I'm sure,

  Which was the poem's sole intent.

  But gravity differs from affection:

  Only one is constant.

  And then the first poem, written on the same day as the first journal entry, two weeks after his father's disappearance.

  He carried me around my whole life--

  Picked me up, took me here and there, said

  Come with me. I'll take you. We'll have fun.

  We never did.

  You don't know a father's weight

  Until it's lifted.

  As I reread the poem, my phone buzzed. Davis. Hi.

  Me: Hi.

  Him: Are you on my blog right now?

  Me: . . . Maybe. Is that okay?

  Him: I'm just glad it's you. My analytics said someone from Indianapolis has been on the site for 30 minutes. I got nervous.

  Me: Why?

  Him: I don't want my terrible poems published in the news.

  Me: Nobody would do that. Also stop saying your poems are terrible.

  Him: How did you find it?

  Me: Searched "the leaves are gone you sh
ould be too." Nothing anyone else would know to search.

  Him: Sorry if I sound paranoid I just like posting there and don't want to have to delete it.

  Him: It was nice to see you tonight.

  Me: Yeah.

  I saw the . . . that meant he was typing, but no words came, so after a while, I wrote him.

  Me: Do you want to facetime?

  Him: Sure.

  My fingers were trembling a little when I tapped the button to start a video call. His face appeared, gray in the ghostlight of his phone, and I held a finger up to my mouth and whispered, "Shh," and we watched each other in silence, our barely discernible faces and bodies exposed through our screens' dim light, more intimate than I could ever be in real life.

  As I looked at his face looking at mine, I realized the light that made him visible to me came mostly from a cycle: Our screens were lighting each of us with light from the other's bedroom. I could only see him because he could see me. In the fear and excitement of being in front of each other in that grainy silver light, it felt like I wasn't really in my bed and he wasn't really in his. Instead, we were together in the non-sensorial place, almost like we were inside the other's consciousness, a closeness that real life with its real bodies could never match.

  After we hung up, he texted me. I like us. For real.

  And somehow, I believed him.

  SIXTEEN

  AND FOR A WHILE, we found ways to be us--hanging out IRL occasionally, but texting and facetiming almost every night. We'd found a way to be on a Ferris wheel without talking about being on a Ferris wheel. Some days I fell deeper into spirals than others, but changing the Band-Aid sort of worked, and the breathing exercises and the pills and everything else sort of worked.

  And my life continued--I read books and did homework, took tests and watched TV with my mom, saw Daisy when she wasn't busy with Mychal, read and reread that college guide and imagined the array of futures it promised.

  And then one night, bored and missing the days when Daisy and I spent half our lives together at Applebee's, I read her Star Wars stories.

  Daisy's most recent story, "A Rey of Hot," had been published the week before. I was astonished to see it had been read thousands of times. Daisy was kind of famous.

  The story, narrated by Rey, takes place on Tatooine, where lovebirds Rey and Chewbacca have stopped off to pick up some cargo from an eight-foot-tall dude named Kalkino. Chewie and Rey are accompanied by a blue-haired girl named Ayala, whom Rey describes as "my best friend and greatest burden."

  They meet up with Kalkino at a pod race, where Kalkino offers the team two million credits to take four boxes of cargo to Utapau.

  "I've got a weird feeling about this," Ayala said.

  I rolled my eyes. Ayala couldn't get anything right. And the more she worried, the worse she made everything. She had the moral integrity of a girl who'd never been hungry, always shitting on the way Chewie and I made a living without noticing that our work provided her with food and shelter. Chewie owed Ayala a life debt because her father had died saving Chewie years ago, and Chewie was a Wookiee of principle even when it wasn't convenient. Ayala's morals were all convenience because easy living was the only kind of living she'd ever known.

  Ayala mumbled, "This isn't right." She reached into her mane of blue hair and plucked out a strand, then twirled it around her finger. A nervous habit, but then all her habits were nervous.

  I kept reading, my gut clenching as I did. Ayala was horrible. She interrupted Chewie and Rey while they were making out on board the Millennium Falcon with an annoying question about the hyperdrive "that a reasonably competent five-year-old could've figured out." She screwed up the shipment by opening one of the cargo cases, revealing power cells that shot off so much energy they almost blew up the ship. At one point, Daisy wrote, "Ayala wasn't a bad person, just a useless one."

  The story ended with the triumphant delivery of the power cells. But because one had lost some of its energy when Ayala opened the box, the recipients knew our intrepid heroes had seen the cargo, and a bounty was placed on their heads--or should I say our heads--all of which meant the stakes would be even higher in next week's story.

  There were dozens of comments. The most recent one was, "I LOVE TO HATE AYALA. THANK YOU FOR BRINGING HER BACK." Daisy had replied to that comment with, "Thx! Thx for reading!"

  I read through the stories in reverse chronological order and discovered all the previous ways Ayala had ruined things for Chewie and Rey. The only time I'd ever done anything worthwhile was when, overcome by anxiety, I threw up on a Hutt named Yantuh, creating a momentary distraction that allowed Chewie to grab a blaster and save us from certain death.

  --

  I stayed up too late reading, and then later still thinking about what I'd say to Daisy the next morning, my thoughts careening between furious and scared, circling around my bedroom like a vulture. I woke up the next morning feeling wretched--not just tired, but terrified. I now saw myself as Daisy saw me--clueless, helpless, useless. Less.

  As I drove to school, my head pounding from sleeplessness, I kept thinking about how I'd been scared of monsters as a kid. When I was little, I knew monsters weren't, like, real. But I also knew I could be hurt by things that weren't real. I knew that made-up things mattered, and could kill you. I felt like that again after reading Daisy's stories, like something invisible was coming for me.

  I expected the sight of Daisy to piss me off, but when I actually saw her, sitting on the steps outside school, bundled up against the cold, a gloved hand waving at me, I felt like--well, like I deserved it, really. Like Ayala was the thing Daisy had to do to live with me.

  She stood up as I approached. "You okay, Holmesy?" Daisy asked. I nodded. I couldn't really say anything. My throat felt tight, like I might start to cry.

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "Just tired," I said.

  "Holmesy, don't take this the wrong way, but you look like you just got off work from your job playing a ghoul at a haunted house, and now you're in a parking lot trying to score some meth."

  "I'll be sure not to take that the wrong way."

  She put her arm around me. "I mean, you're still gorgeous, of course. You can't ungorgeous yourself, Holmesy, no matter how hard you try. I'm just saying you need some sleep. Do some self-care, you know?" I nodded and shrugged off her embrace. "We haven't hung out in forever just the two of us," she said. "Maybe I can come over later?"

  I wanted to tell her no, but I was thinking about how Ayala always said no to everything, and I didn't want to be like my fictional self. "Sure."

  "Mychal and I are having a homework night, but I should have about a hundred and forty-two minutes after school if we go straight to your house, which just happens to be the running time of Attack of the Clones."

  "A homework night?" I asked.

  Mychal appeared from behind me and said, "We're reading A Midsummer Night's Dream to each other for English."

  ". . . seriously?"

  "What?" Daisy said. "It's not my fault we're adorable. But first, Yoda lightsaber battling at your house after school. Cool?"

  "Cool."

  "It's a date," she said.

  --

  Six hours later, we lay on the floor next to each other, bodies propped up with couch cushions, and watched Anakin Skywalker and Padme fall for each other in extremely slow motion. Daisy considered Attack of the Clones to be the most underrated Star Wars film. I thought it was kinda crap, but it was fun to watch Daisy watch it. Her mouth literally moved with each line of dialogue.

  I was looking at my phone mostly, scrolling through articles about Pickett's disappearance, looking for anything that might connect to joggers or a jogger's mouth. I'd meant it when I told Noah I'd keep looking--but the clues we had just didn't seem much like clues.

  "I want to like Jar Jar, because hating Jar Jar is so cliche, but he was the worst," Daisy said. "I actually killed him years ago in my fic. It felt amazing." My stomach turned, but
I concentrated on my phone. "What are you looking at?" she asked.

  "Just reading about the Pickett investigation, seeing if there's anything new. Noah's really screwed up about it, and I . . . I don't know. I just want to help him somehow."

  "Holmesy, we got the reward. It's over. Your problem is you don't know when you've won."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "I mean, Davis gave us the reward so that we would drop it. So, drop it."

  "Yeah, okay," I said. I knew she was right, but she didn't have to be such an asshole about it.

  I thought the conversation was over, but a few seconds later she paused the movie and continued talking. "It's just, like, this isn't going to be some story where the poor, penniless girl gets rich and then realizes that truth matters more than money and establishes her heroism by going back to being the poor, penniless girl, okay? Everyone's life is better with Pickett disappeared. Just let it be."

  "No one's taking away your money," I said quietly.

  "I love you, Holmesy, but be smart."

  "Got it," I said.

  "Promise?"

  "Yeah, I promise."

  "And we break hearts, but we don't break promises," she said.

  "You say that's your 'motto,' but you spend ninety-nine percent of your time with Mychal now."

  "Except right now I'm hanging out with you and Jar Jar Binks," she said.

  We went back to watching the movie. As it ended, she squeezed my arm and said, "I love you," then raced off to Mychal's place.

  SEVENTEEN

  LATER THAT NIGHT, I got a text from Davis.

  Him: You around?

  Me: I am. You want to facetime?

  Him: Could I possibly see you irl?

  Me: I guess, but I'm less fun irl.

  Him: I like you irl. Is now good?

  Me: Now's good.

  Him: Dress warm. It's cold out, and the sky is clear.

  --

  Harold and I drove over to the Pickett compound. He's not much for cold weather, and it seemed to me I could hear something in his engine tightening up, but he held it together for me, that blessed car.

  The walk from the driveway to Davis's house was frigid, even in my winter coat and mittens. You never think much about weather when it's good, but once it gets cold enough to see your breath, you can't ignore it. The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around.