NINE

BUT I ALSO HAD A LIFE, a normal-ish life, which continued. For hours or days, the thoughts would leave me be, and I could remember something my mom told me once: Your now is not your forever. I went to class, got good grades, wrote papers, talked to Mom after lunch, ate dinner, watched television, read. I was not always stuck inside myself, or inside my selves. I wasn’t only crazy.

On date night, I got home from school and spent a solid two hours getting dressed. It was a cloudless day in late September, cold enough to justify a coat, but warm enough that a sleeved dress with tights could be managed. Then again, that might seem like trying, and texting Daisy was no help because she responded she was going to wear an evening gown, and I couldn’t totally tell if she was kidding.

In the end, I went for my favorite jeans and a hoodie over a lavender T-shirt Daisy had given me featuring Han Solo and Chewbacca in a fierce embrace.

I then spent another half hour applying and unapplying makeup. I’m not the sort of person who usually gets carried away with that stuff, but I was nervous, and sometimes makeup feels kind of like armor.

“Are you wearing eyeliner?” Mom asked when I emerged from my room. She was sorting through bills and had spread them out across the entire coffee table. The pen she held hovered over a checkbook.

“A little,” I said. “Does it look weird?”

“Just different,” Mom said, failing to disguise her disapproval. “Where are you headed?”

“Applebee’s with Daisy and Davis and Mychal. Back by midnight.”

“Is this for a date?”

“It’s dinner,” I said.

“Are you dating Davis Pickett?”

“We are both eating dinner at the same restaurant at the same time. It’s not marriage.”

She gestured at the spot next to her on the couch. “I’m supposed to be there at seven,” I said. She pointed at the couch again. I sat down, and she put her arm around me.

“You don’t talk much to your mother.”

Dr. Singh told me once that if you have a perfectly tuned guitar and a perfectly tuned violin in the same room, and you pluck the D string of the guitar, then all the way across the room, the D string on the violin will also vibrate. I could always feel my mother’s vibrating strings. “I also don’t talk much to other people.”

“I want you to be careful about that Davis Pickett, okay? Wealth is careless—so around it, you must be careful.”

“He’s not wealth. He’s a person.”

“People can be careless, too.” She squeezed me so tight it felt like she was pressing the breath out of me. “Just be careful.”

—

I was the last to arrive, and the remaining space was next to Mychal, across from Davis, who was wearing a plaid button-down, nicely ironed, sleeves rolled up just so, exposing his forearms. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always been pretty keen on the male forearm.

“Cool shirt,” Davis said.

“Birthday present from Daisy,” I said.

“You know, some people think it’s bestiality, for a Wookiee to love a human,” Daisy said.

Mychal sighed. “Don’t get her started on the whole Are-Wookiees-people thing.”

“That’s actually the most fascinating thing about Star Wars,” said Davis.

Mychal groaned. “Oh God. It’s happening.” Daisy immediately launched into a defense of Wookiee-human love. “You know, for a moment in Star Wars Apocrypha, Han was actually married to a Wookiee, but does anyone freak out about that?” Davis was leaning forward, listening intently. He was smaller than Mychal, but he took up more room—Davis’s gangly limbs occupied space like an army holds territory.

Davis and Daisy were chatting back and forth about the dehumanization of Clone troopers, and Mychal jumped in to explain that Daisy was actually kind of a famous writer of Star Wars fan fiction. Davis looked her username up on his phone and was impressed by the two thousand reads on her most recent story, and then they were all laughing about some Star Wars joke I couldn’t quite follow.

“Waters for everyone,” Daisy said when Holly arrived to take our drink order.

Davis turned to me and said, “They don’t have Dr Pepper?”

“Soft drinks aren’t covered by the coupon,” Holly explained, monotone. “But also, no. We have Pepsi.”

“Well, I think we can spring for a round of Pepsis,” he said.

I realized in the silence that followed that I hadn’t spoken since answering Davis’s compliment about my shirt. Davis, Daisy, and Mychal eventually went back to talking about Star Wars and the size of the universe and traveling faster than light. “Star Wars is the American religion,” Davis said at one point, and Mychal said, “I think religion is the American religion,” and even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.

After a while, I heard my name and snapped into my body, seated at Applebee’s, my back against the green vinyl cushion, the smell of fried food, the din of conversation pressing in from all around me. “Holmesy has a Facebook,” Daisy said, “but her last status update is from middle school.” She shot me a look that I couldn’t quite interpret, and then said, “Holmesy’s like a grandmother when it comes to the internet.” She paused again. “Aren’t you?” she said pointedly, and then I realized at last she was trying to make room for me to talk.

“I use the internet. I just don’t feel a need to, like, contribute to it.”

“It does feel like the internet already contains plenty of information,” Davis allowed.

“Wrong,” Daisy said. “For instance, there is very little high-quality romantic Chewbacca fic on the internet, and I am just one person, who can only write so much. The world needs Holmesy’s Wookiee love stories.” There was a brief pause in the conversation. I felt my arms prickling with nervousness, sweat glands threatening to burst open. And then they went back to talking, the conversation shifting this way and that, everyone telling stories, talking over one another, laughing. I tried to smile and shake my head at the right times, but I was always a moment behind the rest of them. They laughed because something was funny; I laughed because they had.

I didn’t feel hungry, but when our food arrived I picked at my veggie burger with a knife and fork to make it look like I was eating more than I could actually stomach. Eating quieted the conversation for a while, until Holly dropped off the check, which I picked up.

Davis reached across the table and put his hand on top of mine. “Please,” he said. “It is not an inconvenience to me.” I let him take it.

“We should do something,” Daisy said. I was ready to go home, eat something in private, and go to sleep. “Let’s go to a movie or something.”

“We can just watch one at my house,” Davis said. “We get all the movies.”

Mychal’s head tilted. “What do you mean you ‘get all the movies’?”

“I mean, we get all the movies that go to theaters. We have a screening room, and we . . . just pay for them or whatever. I actually don’t know how it works.”

“You mean, when a movie comes out in theaters, it . . . also comes out at your house?”

“Yeah,” Davis said. “When I was a kid, we had to have a projectionist come out, but now it’s all digital.”

“Like, inside your house?” Mychal asked, still confused.

“Yeah, I’ll show you,” Davis said.

Daisy looked over at me. “You up for it, Holmesy?” I contracted my face into a smile and nodded.

—

I drove Harold to Davis’s house; Daisy drove with Mychal in his parents’ minivan, and Davis led in his Escalade. Our little caravan headed west on Eighty-Sixth Street to Michigan Road, and then followed it down past Walmart, past the pawnshops and payday loan outfits to the gates of Davis’s estate across the road from the art museum. The Pickett estate wasn’t in a nice neighborhood, exactly, but it was so gigantic that it functioned as a neighborhood unto itself.

The gate opened, and we followed Davis to a parking lot beside the glass mansion. The house looked even more amazing in the dark. Through the walls, I could see the whole kitchen suffused with gold light.

Mychal ran up to me as I exited Harold. “Do you know—oh my God, I’ve always wanted to see this house. This is Tu-Quyen Pham, you know.”

“Who?”

“The architect,” he said. “Tu-Quyen Pham. She’s crazy famous. She’s only designed three residences in the U.S. Oh my God, I can’t believe I am seeing this.”

We followed him into the house, and Mychal exclaimed a series of artist names. “Pettibon! Picasso! Oh my God, that’s KERRY JAMES MARSHALL.” I only knew who Picasso was.

“Yeah, I actually pressed Dad to buy that one,” Davis said. “Couple years ago, he took me to an art fair in Miami Beach. I really love KJM’s work.” I noticed Noah was lying on the same couch, playing what appeared to be the same video game. “Noah, these are my friends. Friends, Noah.”

“’Sup,” Noah said.

“Is it okay if I just, like, walk around?” Mychal asked.

“Yeah, of course. Check out the Rauschenberg combine upstairs.”

“No way,” Mychal said, and charged up the stairs, Daisy trailing behind him.

I found myself pulled toward the painting that Mychal had called “Pettibon.” It was a colorful spiral, or maybe a multicolored rose, or a whirlpool. By some trick of the curved lines, my eyes got lost in the painting so that I kept having to refocus on tiny individual pieces of it. It didn’t feel like something I was looking at so much as something I was part of. I felt, and then dismissed, an urge to grab the painting off the wall and run away with it.

I jumped a little when Davis placed his hand on the small of my back. “Raymond Pettibon. He’s most famous for his paintings of surfers, but I like his spirals. He was a punk musician before he became an artist. He was in Black Flag before it was Black Flag.”

“I don’t know what Black Flag is,” I said.

He pulled out his phone and tapped around a bit, and then a screeching wave of sound, complete with a screaming, gravelly voice, filled the room from speakers above. “That’s Black Flag,” he said, then used his phone to stop the music. “Want to see the theater?”

I nodded, and he took me downstairs to the basement, except it wasn’t really a basement because the ceilings were like fifteen feet high. We walked down the hallway to a bookshelf lined with hardcover books. “My dad’s collection of first editions,” he said. “We’re not allowed to read any of them, of course. The oil from human hands damages them. But you can take out this one,” he said, and pointed at a hardcover copy of Tender Is the Night.

I reached for it, and the moment my hand touched the spine, the bookshelf parted in the middle and opened inward to reveal the theater, which had six stadium-style rows of black leather seats. “By F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Davis explained, “whose full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.” I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t get over the size of the movie screen. “It’s probably obvious how hard I’m trying to impress you,” he said.

“Well, it’s not working. I always hang out in mansions with hidden movie theaters.”

“Want to watch something? Or we could go for a walk? There’s something I want to show you outside.”

“We shouldn’t abandon Daisy and Mychal.”

“I’ll let them know.” He fiddled around on his phone for a second and then spoke into it. “We’re going for a walk. Make yourselves at home. Theater’s in the basement if you’re interested.”

A moment later, his voice began playing over the speakers, repeating what he’d just said. “I could’ve just texted her,” I said.

“Yeah, but that wouldn’t have been as awesome.”

—

I zipped up my hoodie and followed Davis outside. We walked in silence down one of the asphalt golf paths, past the pool, which was lit from inside the water, slowly changing colors from red to orange to yellow to green. The light cast an eerie glow up onto the windows of the terrarium that reminded me of pictures of the northern lights.

We kept walking until we reached one of the oblong sand bunkers of the golf course. Davis lay down inside of it, his head resting on its grassy lip. I lay down next to him, our jackets touching without our skin touching. He pointed up at the sky and said, “So the light pollution is terrible, but the brightest star you see—there, see it?” I nodded. “That’s not a star. That’s Jupiter. But Jupiter is, like, depending on orbits and stuff, between three hundred sixty and six hundred seventy million miles away. Right now, it’s around five hundred million miles, which is around forty-five light-minutes. You know what light-time is?”

“Kinda,” I said.

“It means if we were traveling at the speed of light, it would take us forty-five minutes to get from Earth to Jupiter, so the Jupiter we’re seeing right now is actually Jupiter forty-five minutes ago. But, like, just above the trees there, those five stars that kind of make a crooked W?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Right, that’s Cassiopeia. And the crazy thing is, the star on the top, Caph—it’s 55 light-years away. Then there’s Shedar, which is 230 light-years away. And then Navi, which is 550 light-years away. It’s not only that we aren’t close to them; they aren’t close to one another. For all we know, Navi blew up five hundred years ago.”

“Wow,” I said. “So, you’re looking at the past.”

“Yeah, exactly.” I felt him fumbling for something—his phone, maybe—and then glanced down and realized he was trying to hold my hand. I took it. We were quiet beneath the old light above us. I was thinking about how the sky—at least this sky—wasn’t actually black. The real darkness was in the trees, which could be seen only in silhouette. The trees were shadows of themselves against the rich silver-blue of the night sky.

I heard him turn his head toward me and could feel him looking at me. I wondered why I wanted him to kiss me, and how to know why you want to be with someone, how to disentangle the messy knots of wanting. And I wondered why I was scared to turn my head toward him.

Davis started talking about the stars again—as the night got darker, I could see more and more of them, faint and wobbly, just teetering on the edge of visibility—and he was telling me about light pollution and how I could see the stars moving if I waited long enough, and how some Greek philosopher thought the stars were pinpricks in a cosmic shroud. Then, after he fell quiet for a moment, he said, “You don’t talk much, Aza.”

“I’m never sure what to say.”

He mimicked me from the day we’d met again by the pool. “Try saying what you’re thinking. That’s something I never ever do.”

I told him the truth. “I’m thinking about mere organism stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“I can’t explain it,” I said.

“Try me.”

I looked over at him now. Everyone always celebrates the easy attractiveness of green or blue eyes, but there was a depth to Davis’s brown eyes that you just don’t get from lighter colors, and the way he looked at me made me feel like there was something worthwhile in the brown of my eyes, too.

“I guess I just don’t like having to live inside of a body? If that makes sense. And I think maybe deep down I am just an instrument that exists to turn oxygen into carbon dioxide, just like merely an organism in this . . . vastness. And it’s kind of terrifying to me that what I think of as, like, my quote unquote self isn’t really under my control? Like, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, my hand is sweating right now, even though it’s too cold for sweating, and I really hate that once I start sweating I can’t stop, and then I can’t think about anything else except for how I’m sweating. And if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know? Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.”

“I can’t tell that you’re sweating at all, actually. But I bet that doesn’t help.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t.” I took my hand from his and wiped it on my jeans, then wiped my face with the sleeve of my hoodie. I disgusted myself. I was revolting, but I couldn’t recoil from my self because I was stuck inside of it. I thought about how the smell of your sweat isn’t from sweat itself, but from the bacteria that eat it.

I started telling Davis about this weird parasite, Diplostomum pseudospathaceum. It matures in the eyes of fish, but can only reproduce inside the stomach of a bird. Fish infected with immature parasites swim in deep water to make it harder for birds to spot, but then, once the parasite is ready to mate, the infected fish suddenly start swimming close to the surface. They start trying to get themselves eaten by a bird, basically, and eventually they succeed, and the parasite that was authoring the story all along ends up exactly where it needs to be: in the belly of a bird. The parasite breeds there, and then baby parasites get crapped out into the water by birds, whereupon they meet with a fish, and the cycle begins anew.

I was trying to explain to him why this freaked me out so much but not really succeeding, and I recognized that I’d pulled the conversation very far away from the point where we’d held hands and been close to kissing, that now I was talking about parasite-infected bird feces, which was more or less the opposite of romance, but I couldn’t stop myself, because I wanted him to understand that I felt like the fish, like my whole story was written by someone else.

I even told him something I’d never actually said to Daisy or Dr. Singh or anybody—that the pressing of my thumbnail against my fingertip had started off as a way of convincing myself that I was real. As a kid, my mom had told me that if you pinch yourself and don’t wake up, you can be sure that you’re not dreaming; and so every time I thought maybe I wasn’t real, I would dig my nail into my fingertip, and I would feel the pain, and for a second I’d think, Of course I’m real. But the fish can feel pain, is the thing. You can’t know whether you’re doing the bidding of some parasite, not really.

After I said all that, we were quiet for a long time, until finally he said, “My mom was in the hospital for, like, six months after her aneurysm. Did you know that?” I shook my head. “I guess she was kind of in a coma or whatever—like, she couldn’t talk or anything, or feed herself, but sometimes if you put your hand in her hand, she would squeeze.

“Noah was too young to visit much, but I got to. Every single day after school, Rosa would take me to the hospital and I would lie in bed with her and we would watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the TV in her room.

“Her eyes were open and everything, and she could breathe by herself, and I would lie there next to her and watch TMNT, and I would always have the Iron Man in my hand, my fingers squeezed into a fist around it, and I would put my fist in her hand and wait, and sometimes she would squeeze, her fist around my fist, and when it happened, it made me feel . . . I don’t know . . . loved, I guess.

“Anyway, I remember once Dad came, and he stood against the wall at the edge of the room like she was contagious or something. At one point, she squeezed my hand, and I told him. I told him she was holding my hand, and he said, ‘It’s just a reflex,’ and I said, ‘She’s holding my hand, Dad, look.’ And he said, ‘She’s not in there, Davis. She’s not in there anymore.’

“But that’s not how it works, Aza. She was still real. She was still alive. She was as much a person as any other person; you’re real, but not because of your body or because of your thoughts.”

“Then what?” I said.

He sighed. “I don’t know.”

“Thanks for telling me that,” I said. I’d turned to him and was looking at his face in profile. Sometimes, Davis looked like a boy—pale skin, acne on his chin. But now he looked handsome. The silence between us grew uncomfortable until eventually I asked him the stupidest question, because I actually wanted to know its answer. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking it’s too good to be true,” he said.

“What is?”

“You.”

“Oh.” And then after a second, I added, “Nobody ever says anything is too bad to be true.”

“I know you saw the picture. The night-vision picture.” I didn’t answer, so he continued. “That’s the thing you know, that you want to tell the cops. Did they offer you a reward for it?”

“I’m not here looking for—” I said.

“But how can I ever know that, Aza? How will I ever know? With anyone? Did you give it to them yet?”

“No, we won’t. Daisy wants to, but I won’t let her. I promise.”

“I can’t know that,” he said. “I keep trying to forget it, but I can’t.”

“I don’t want the reward,” I said, but even I didn’t know if I meant it.

“Being vulnerable is asking to get used.”

“That’s true for anybody, though,” I said. “It’s not even important. It’s just a picture. It doesn’t say anything about where he is.”

“It gives them a time and a place. You’re right, though. They won’t find him. But they will ask me why I didn’t turn over that picture. And they’ll never believe me, because I don’t have a good reason. It’s just that I don’t want to deal with kids at school while he’s on trial. I don’t want Noah to have to deal with that. I want . . . for everything to be like it was. And him gone is closer to that than him in jail. The truth is, he didn’t tell me he was leaving. But if he had, I wouldn’t have stopped him.”

“Even if we gave them that picture, it’s not like they’re going to arrest you or anything.”

Suddenly, Davis stood up and took off across the golf course. “This is a completely solvable problem,” I heard him say to himself.

I followed him up the walkway to the cottage, and we went inside. It was a rustic cabin with wood paneling everywhere, high ceilings, and an astonishing variety of animal heads on the walls. A plaid, overstuffed couch and matching chairs formed a semicircle facing a massive fireplace.

Davis walked over to the bar area, opened the cabinet above the sink, pulled out a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, and started shaking out its contents. A few Cheerios poured out of the box into the sink, and then a bundle of bills banded with a strip of paper. I stepped forward and saw that the wrapping read “$10,000,” which seemed impossible, because the stack was so small—a quarter-inch high at the most. Another stack came out of the Cheerios box, and then another. He reached up for a box of shredded wheat puffs and repeated the process. “What—what are you doing?”

As he grabbed a third box of cereal, he said, “My dad, he hides them everywhere. These stacks. I found one inside the living room couch the other day. He hides cash like alcoholics hide vodka bottles.” Davis brushed some cereal dust off the hundred-dollar bills, stacked them next to the sink, and then grabbed them. The entire stack fit in one hand. “A hundred thousand dollars,” he said, and offered it to me.

“No way, Davis. I can’t—”

“Aza, the cops found, like, two million dollars executing their warrant, but I bet they didn’t even get half of it. Everywhere I look, I find these stacks, okay? Not to sound out of touch, but for my dad, this is a goddamned rounding error. It’s a reward for not sharing the picture. I’ll have our lawyer call you. Simon Morris. He’s nice, just a little lawyery.”

“I’m not trying—”

“But I can’t know that,” he said. “Please, just—if you still call or text or whatever, I’ll know it’s not about the reward. And you will, too. That would be a nice thing to know—even if you don’t call.” He walked over to a closet, opened it, stuffed the money into a blue tote bag, and offered it to me.

He looked like a kid now—his watery brown eyes, the fear and fatigue in his face, like a kid waking up from a nightmare or something. I took the bag.

“I’ll call you,” I said.

“We’ll see.”

—

I left the cabin calmly, then sprinted through the golf course, skirting the pool complex, and ran up to the mansion. I ran upstairs and walked along a hallway until I could hear Daisy talking behind a closed door. I opened it. Daisy and Mychal were kissing in a large four-poster bed.

“Um,” I said.

“A bit of privacy, please?” Daisy asked.

I closed the door, muttering, “Well, but it isn’t your house.”

I didn’t know where to go then. I walked back downstairs. Noah was on the couch watching TV. As I walked over to him, I noticed he was wearing actual pajamas—Captain America ones—even though he was thirteen. On his lap, there was a bowl of what appeared to be dry Lucky Charms. He took a handful and shoved them into his mouth. “’Sup,” he said while chewing. His hair was greasy and matted to his forehead, and up close he looked pale, almost translucent.

“You doing okay, Noah?”

“Kickin’ ass and takin’ names,” he said. He swallowed, and then said, “So, did you find anything yet?”

“Huh?”

“About Dad,” he said. “Davis said you were after the reward. Did you find anything?”

“Not really.”

“Can I send you something? I took all the notes off Dad’s phone from iCloud. They might help you. Might be a clue or something. The last note, the one he wrote that night, was ‘the jogger’s mouth.’ That mean anything to you?”

“I don’t think so.” I gave him my number so he could text me the notes and told him I’d look into it.

“Thanks,” he said. His voice had gotten small. “Davis thinks we’re better off with him on the run. Says it’d be worse if he was in jail.”

“What do you think?”

He stared up at me for a moment, then said, “I want him to come home.”

I sat down on the couch next to him. “I’m sure he’ll show up.”

I felt him leaning over until his shoulder was against mine. I wasn’t wild about touching strangers, especially given that he didn’t seem to have showered in some time, but I said, “It’s all right to be scared, Noah.” And then he turned his face away from me and started sobbing. “You’re okay,” I told him, lying. “You’re okay. He’ll come home.”

“I can’t think straight,” he said, his little voice half strangled by the crying. “Ever since he left, I can’t think straight.” I knew how that felt—all my life, I’d been unable to think straight, unable to even finish having a thought because my thoughts came not in lines but in knotted loops curling in upon themselves, in sinking quicksand, in light-swallowing wormholes. “You’re okay,” I lied to him again. “You probably just need some rest.” I didn’t know what else to say. He was so small, and so alone.

“Will you let me know? If you find anything out about Dad, I mean.”

“Yeah, of course.”

After a while, he straightened up and wiped his face against his sleeve. I told him he should get some sleep. It was nearly midnight.

He put the bowl of Lucky Charms on the coffee table, stood up, and walked upstairs without saying good-bye.

I didn’t know where to go, and having the bag of money in my hand was freaking me out a little, so in the end I just left the house. I looked up at the sky as I ambled toward Harold, and thought about the stars in Cassiopeia, centuries of light-time from me and from one another.

I swung the bag in my hand as I walked. It weighed almost nothing.