Turtles All the Way Down

  As I approached, the front door opened for me. Davis was sitting on the couch next to Noah, playing their usual starfighter video game. "Hi," I said.

  "Hey," Davis said.

  "'Sup," Noah added.

  "Listen, bud," Davis said as he stood up. "I'm gonna go for a walk with Aza before she debundles. Back in a bit, cool?" He reached over and mussed Noah's hair.

  "Cool," Noah said.

  --

  "I read Daisy's stories," I told him as we walked. The grass of the golf course was still cut perfectly short, even though the only golfer in the family had now been missing for months.

  "They're pretty good, right?"

  "I guess. I was distracted by how terrible Ayala is."

  "She's not all bad. Just anxious."

  "She causes one hundred percent of the problems in the stories."

  He nudged his shoulder against me sweetly. "I kind of liked her, but I guess I'm biased."

  --

  We walked around the whole property until we eventually stopped at the pool. Davis tapped a button on his phone and the pool cover rolled away. We sat down on lounge chairs next to each other, and I watched the water from the pool steam into the cold air as Davis lay back to look up at the sky. "I don't understand why he's so stuck inside himself, when there is this endlessness to fall into."

  "Who is?"

  "Noah." I noticed he'd reached into his coat pocket. He pulled something out and twirled it in his palm. At first, I thought it might be a pen, but then as he moved it rhythmically through his fingers, like a magician playing with cards, I realized it was the Iron Man. "Don't judge me," he said. "It's been a bad week."

  "I just don't think Iron Man is much of a superh--"

  "You're breaking my heart, Aza. So, you see Saturn up there?" Using his Iron Man as a pointer, he told me how you can tell the difference between a planet and a star, and where different constellations were. And he told me that our galaxy was a big spiral, and that a lot of galaxies were. "Every star we can see right now is in that spiral. It's huge."

  "Does it have a center?"

  "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, the whole galaxy is rotating around this supermassive black hole. But very slowly. I mean, it takes our solar system like two hundred twenty-five million Earth years to orbit the galaxy."

  I asked him if the spirals of the galaxy were infinite, and he said no, and then he asked about my spirals.

  I told him about this mathematician Kurt Godel, who had this really bad fear of being poisoned, so much so that he couldn't bring himself to eat food unless it was prepared by his wife. And then one day his wife got sick and had to go into the hospital, so Godel stopped eating. I told Davis how even though Godel must've known that starvation was a greater risk than poisoning, he just couldn't eat, and so he starved to death. At seventy-one. He cohabitated with the demon for seventy-one years, and then it got him in the end.

  When I'd finished the story, he asked, "Do you worry that will happen to you?"

  And I said, "It's so weird, to know you're crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It's not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can't figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can't be sure, you know? If you're Godel, you just can't be sure your food isn't poisoned."

  "Do you worry that will happen to you?" he asked again.

  "I worry about a lot of things."

  We kept on talking, for so long that the stars moved above us, until eventually he asked, "Wanna swim?"

  "Bit cold," I said.

  "Pool's heated," he answered. He stood up and pulled off his shirt, then kicked out of his jeans while I watched. I liked watching him take off his jeans. He was skinny, but I liked his body--the small but sinewy muscles in his back, his goose-bumped legs. Shivering, he jumped into the water. "Magnificent," he said.

  "I don't have a bathing suit."

  "Well, if you have a bra and underwear that's basically a bikini." I laughed and took off my coat, then stood up.

  "Do you mind turning around?" I asked him. He turned toward the dimly lit terrarium, where the billionaire-in-waiting was hiding somewhere in her artificial forest.

  I wriggled out of my jeans and pulled off my shirt. I felt naked even though technically I wasn't, but I dropped my hands to my sides and said, "Okay, you can look." I slid into the warmth of the pool next to him; he put his hands on my waist under the water, but didn't try to kiss me.

  The terrarium was behind him, and now that my eyes were fully adjusted to the dark I could see the tuatara on a branch, staring at us through one of her redblack eyes. "Tua's watching us," I said.

  "She's such a perv," Davis answered, and then turned to look at the animal. Her green skin had some kind of yellow moss growing on it, and I could see her teeth as she breathed with her mouth slightly open. Her miniature crocodile tail flickered suddenly, and Davis startled, curling into me, then laughed. "I hate that thing," he said.

  --

  It was freezing when we got out. We didn't have any towels, so we carried our clothes in our arms and ran back to the house. Noah was still on the couch playing the same game. I hustled past him and jogged up the marble stairs.

  Once we were dressed, we went to Davis's bedroom. He put the Iron Man on his bedside table, then knelt down to show me how his telescope worked. He plugged some coordinates into a remote control, and the telescope moved itself. When it stopped, Davis stooped to look through the lens, then cleared the way for me.

  "That's Tau Ceti," he said. The way the telescope was zoomed in, I couldn't see anything but darkness and one jittering disk of white light. "Twelve light-years away, similar to our sun but a little smaller. Two of its planets actually might be habitable--probably not, but maybe. It's my favorite star." I didn't know what I was supposed to be seeing--it was just a circle like any other. But then he explained.

  "I like to look at it and think about how the sun's light looks to someone in Tau Ceti's solar system. Right now, they're seeing our light from twelve years ago--in the light they're seeing, my mom has three years to live. This house has just been built, and Mom and Dad are always fighting about the layout of the kitchen. In the light they see, you and I are just kids. We've got the best and the worst of it in front of us."

  "We still have the best and the worst of it in front of us," I said.

  "I hope not," he said. "I sure as hell hope the worst is behind me."

  I pulled away from Tau Ceti's twelve-year-old light and looked up at Davis. I took his hand, and part of me wanted to tell him I loved him, but I wasn't sure if I really did. Our hearts were broken in the same places. That's something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.

  It sucked having a dead person in your family, and I knew what he meant, about seeking solace in the old light. Three years from now, I knew, he'd find a different favorite star, one with older light to gaze upon. And when time caught up with that one, he'd love a farther star, and a farther one, because you can't let the light catch up with the present. Otherwise you'd forget.

  That's why I liked looking at my dad's pictures. It was the same thing, really. Photographs are just light and time.

  "I should go," I said quietly.

  "Can I see you this weekend?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Could we hang out at your house next time, maybe?"

  "Sure," I said. "If you don't mind being harassed by my mother."

  He assured me he didn't, and then we hugged good-bye, and as I left him alone in his room, he knelt back down to the telescope.

  --

  When I got home that night, I told Mom that Davis wanted to come over this weekend. "Is he your boyfriend?" she asked.

  "I guess so," I said.

  "He respects you as an equal?"

  "Yeah."

  "He listens to you as much as you listen to him?"

  "Well, I'm not great at talking. But yes. He listens to me. He's really, really sweet, and also at some point you just hav
e to trust me, you know?"

  She sighed. "All I want in this world is to keep you. Keep you from hurt, keep you from stress, all that." I hugged her. "You know I love you."

  I smiled. "Yeah, Mom. I know you love me. You definitely don't have to worry about that."

  --

  After going to bed that night, I checked in on Davis's blog.

  "Doubt thou that the stars are fire, / Doubt that the sun doth move."

  --WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  It dothn't move, of course--well, it does, but not around us. Even Shakespeare assumed fundamental truths about the fundament that turned out to be wrong. Who knows what lies I believe, or you do. Who knows what we shouldn't doubt.

  Tonight, under the sky, she asked me, "Why do all the ones about me have quotes from The Tempest? Is it because we are shipwrecked?"

  Yes. Yes, it is because we are shipwrecked.

  I hit refresh after reading it, just in case, and there was a new entry, posted minutes before.

  "There's an expression in classical music. It goes, 'We went out to the meadow.' It's for those evenings that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren't even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling."

  --TOM WAITS

  I know she's reading this right now. (Hi.) I felt like we went out to the meadow tonight, only we weren't playing music. In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It was like we weren't even there, lying together by the pool. It felt like we were in some place your body can't visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments.

  And that really should have ended my evening. But instead of going to sleep, I decided to torture myself by reading more Ayala stories.

  I didn't understand how Davis could like her. She was horrible--totally self-centered and perpetually annoying. At one party scene, Rey observed, "Of course, when Ayala's around, it's never really a party, because at parties, people have fun."

  Eventually, I clicked away from the site, but I couldn't bring myself to put away the computer and go to sleep. Instead, I ended up on Wikipedia, reading about fan fiction and Star Wars, and then I found myself reading the same old articles about the human microbiota and studies of how people's microbial makeup had shaped and, in some cases, killed them.

  At one point, I came across this sentence: "Mammal brains receive a constant stream of interoceptive input from the GI tract, which combines with other interoceptive information from within the body and contextual information from the environment before sending an integrated response to target cells within the GI tract through what is commonly called the 'gut-brain informational axis' but might be better described as the 'gut-brain informational cycle.'"

  I realize that's not the sort of sentence that fills most people with horror, but it stopped me cold. It was saying that my bacteria were affecting my thinking--maybe not directly, but through the information they told my gut to send to my brain. Maybe you're not even thinking this thought. Maybe your thinking's infected. Shouldn't've been reading these articles. Should've gone to sleep. Too late now.

  I checked the light under the door to make sure Mom had gone to sleep and then snuck over to the bathroom. I changed the Band-Aid, looking carefully at the old one. There was blood. Not a lot, but blood. Faintly pink. It isn't infected. It bleeds because it hasn't scabbed over. But it could be. It isn't. Are you sure? Did you even clean it this morning? Probably. I always clean it. Are you sure? Oh, for fuck's sake.

  I washed my hands, put on a new Band-Aid, but now I was being pulled all the way down. I opened the medicine cabinet quietly. Took out the aloe-scented hand sanitizer. I took a gulp, then another. Felt dizzy. You can't do this. This shit's pure alcohol. It'll make you sick. Better do it again. Poured some more of it on my tongue. That's enough. You'll be clean after this. Just get one last swallow down. I did. Heard my gut rumbling. Stomach hurt.

  Sometimes you clear out the healthy bacteria and that's when C. diff comes in. You gotta watch out for that. Great, you tell me to drink it, then tell me not to.

  Back in my room, sweating over the covers, body clammy, corpse-like. Can't get my head straight. Drinking hand sanitizer is not going to make you healthier, you crazy fuck. But they can talk to your brain. THEY can tell your brain what to think, and you can't. So, who's running the show? Stop it, please.

  I tried not to think the thought, but like a dog on a leash I could only get so far from it before I felt the strangling pull against my throat. My stomach rumbled.

  Nothing worked. Even giving in to the thought had only provided a moment's release. I returned to a question Dr. Singh had first asked me years ago, the first time it got this bad: Do you feel like you're a threat to yourself? But which is the threat and which is the self? I wasn't not a threat, but couldn't say to whom or what, the pronouns and objects of the sentence muddied by the abstraction of it all, the words sucked into the non-lingual way down. You're a we. You're a you. You're a she, an it, a they. My kingdom for an I.

  Felt myself slipping, but even that's a metaphor. Descending, but that is, too. Can't describe the feeling itself except to say that I'm not me. Forged in the smithy of someone else's soul. Please just let me out. Whoever is authoring me, let me up out of this. Anything to be out of this.

  But I couldn't get out.

  Three flakes, then four arrive.

  Then many more.

  EIGHTEEN

  MOM WOKE ME UP AT 6:50. "Sleep through your alarm?" she asked.

  I squinted. It was still dark in my room. "I'm fine," I said.

  "You sure?"

  "Yeah," I said, and pulled myself out of bed.

  I was at school just thirty-two minutes later. I didn't look my best, but I'd long ago given up trying to impress the student body of White River High School.

  Daisy was sitting alone on the front steps. "You look sleepy," she said as I walked up. It was cloudy, the kind of day where the sun is a supposition.

  "Long night. How are you?"

  "Great, except I haven't seen nearly enough of my best friend lately. You want to hang out later? Applebee's?"

  "Sure," I said.

  "Also, my mom had to borrow my car, so can we just go together?"

  --

  I made it through lunch, through the standard post-lunch encounter with Mom worrying over my "tired eyes," through history and statistics. In each room the soul-sucking fluorescent light coated everything in a film of sickness, and the day droned on until the final bell released me at last. I made it to Harold, sat down in the driver's seat, and waited for Daisy.

  I hadn't been sleeping much. Hadn't been thinking straight. That sanitizer is basically pure alcohol; you can't keep drinking that. Should probably call Dr. Singh, but then you'll have to talk to her answering service and tell a stranger that you're crazy. Can't bear the thought of Dr. Singh calling back, voice tinged with sympathy, asking whether I'm taking the medication every day. Doesn't work anyway. Nothing does. Three different medications and five years of cognitive behavioral therapy later, and here we are.

  --

  I startled awake at the sound of Daisy opening the passenger door. "You okay?" she asked.

  "Yeah," I said. I turned the car on. Felt my spine straightening. I reversed out of the parking spot and then waited in line to leave campus. "You barely even changed my name," I said. My voice felt squeaky, but I was finding it.

  "Huh?"

  "Ayala, Aza. Beginning of the alphabet to the end and back. Gave her compulsions. Gave her my personality. Anyone reading it would know how you really feel about me. Mychal. Davis. Everyone at school, probably."

  "Aza," Daisy said. My real name sounded wrong in her voice. "You're not--"

  "Oh, fuck off."

  "I've been writing them since I was eleven, and you've never read a single one."

  "You never asked."

 
; "First, I did ask. A bunch of times. And then I got tired of you saying you'd read them and never doing it. And second, I shouldn't have to ask. You could take three seconds away from your nonstop fucking contemplation of yourself to think about other people's interests. Look, I came up with Ayala in like seventh grade. And it was a dick move, but she's her own character now. She's not you, okay?" We were still inching our way through the student parking lot. "I mean, I love you, and it's not your fault, but your anxiety does kind of invite disasters."

  At last I pulled off campus and headed north up Meridian toward the highway. She kept talking, of course. She always did. "I'm sorry, okay? I should've let Ayala die years ago. But yeah, you're right, it is kind of a way of coping with--I mean, Holmesy, you're exhausting."

  "Yeah, all our friendship has gotten you in the last couple months is fifty thousand dollars and a boyfriend. You're right, I'm a terrible person. What'd you call me in that story? Useless. I'm useless."

  "Aza, she's not you. But you are . . . extremely self-centered. Like, I know you have the mental problems and whatever, but they do make you . . . you know."

  "I don't know, actually. They make me what?"

  "Mychal said once that you're like mustard. Great in small quantities, but then a lot of you is . . . a lot."

  I didn't say anything.

  "I'm sorry. I shouldn't've said that."

  We were stopped at a red light, and when it turned green I was somewhat ungentle with Harold's accelerator. I could feel the heat in my cheeks, but couldn't tell if I was about to start crying or screaming. Daisy kept going. "But you know what I mean. Like, what are my parents' names?"

  I didn't answer. I didn't know the answer. I just took a long breath, trying to push my heartbeat down into my chest. I didn't need Daisy to point out what a shitshow I was. I knew.

  "What are their jobs? When was the last time you were at my apartment--five years ago? We're supposed to be best friends, Holmesy, and you don't even know if I have any fucking pets. You have no idea what it's like for me, and you're so, like, pathologically uncurious that you don't even know what you don't know."

  "You have a cat," I whispered.

  "You just have no fucking clue. It's all so fucking easy for you. I mean, you think you and your mom are poor or whatever, but you got braces. You got a car and a laptop and all that shit, and you think it's natural. You think it's just normal to have a house with your own room and a mom who helps you with your homework. You don't think you're privileged, but you have everything. You don't know what it's like for me, and you don't ask. I share a room with my annoying eight-year-old sister whose name you don't know and then you judge me for buying a car instead of saving it all for college, but you don't know. You want me to be some selfless, proper heroine who's too good for money, but that's bullshit, Holmesy. Being poor doesn't purify you or whatever the fuck. It just sucks. You don't know my life. You haven't taken the time to find out, and you don't get to judge me."