Turtles All the Way Down

  "So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, 'That's all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.'

  "The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, 'Well, but if that's so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?'

  "And the woman says, 'It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle.'

  "And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, 'Well, then what is that turtle standing upon?'

  "And the old woman says, 'Sir, you don't understand. It's turtles all the way down.'"

  I laughed. "It's turtles all the way down."

  "It's turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You're trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that's not how it works."

  "Because it's turtles all the way down," I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation.

  --

  I stopped at Mom's classroom for the last few minutes of lunch. I closed the door behind me and sat down at a desk opposite her. I glanced up at the clock on the wall. 1:08. I had six minutes. I didn't want more.

  "Hey," I said.

  "First day back going well?" She blew her nose into a Kleenex. She had a cold, but she'd spent all her sick days on me being sick.

  "Yeah," I said. "So listen, Davis gave me some money. A lot of money. About fifty thousand dollars. I haven't spent it or anything. I'm saving it for college." Her face tightened. "It was a gift," I said again.

  "When?" she asked.

  "Um, a couple months ago."

  "That's not a gift. A necklace is a gift. Fifty thousand dollars is . . . not a gift. If I were you, I'd return that money to Davis," she said. "You don't want to feel indebted to him."

  "But I'm not you," I said. "And I don't."

  After a second, she said, "That's true. You're not." I waited for her to say something more, to tell me why I was wrong to keep the money.

  At last, she said, "Your life is yours, Aza, but I think if you look at your mental health the last couple months . . ."

  "The money didn't cause that. I've been sick for a long time."

  "Not like this. I need you to be well, Aza. I can't lose--"

  "God, Mom, please stop saying that. I know you're not trying to make me feel pressure, but it feels like I'm hurting you, like I'm committing assault or something, and it makes me feel ten thousand times worse. I'm doing my best, but I can't stay sane for you, okay?"

  After a minute she said, "The day you came home after the accident, I carried you to the bathroom, and I carried you back to bed and tucked the covers up to your chin, and I realized that I'll probably never pick you up again. You're right. I keep saying I can't lose you, but I will. I am. And that's a hard thought. That's a hard, hard thought. But you're right. You're not me. You make your own choices. And if you're saving it for your education, making responsible decisions, well, then, I'm--" She never finished the sentence, because the bell beeped from on high.

  "Okay," I said.

  "Love you, Aza."

  "I love you, too, Mom." I wanted to say more, to find a way to express the magnetic poles of my love for my mother: thank you I'm sorry thank you I'm sorry. But I couldn't bring myself to, and anyway, the bell had rung.

  --

  Before I could get to history, Mychal intercepted me. "Hey, how's it going?" he asked.

  "I'm okay, you?"

  "Daisy and I broke up."

  "I heard."

  "I'm kinda devastated."

  "Sorry."

  "And she isn't even upset about it, which just makes me feel pathetic. She thinks I should get over it, but everything reminds me of her, Holmesy, and seeing her ignore me, not show up to lunch, all that--can you, um, talk to her for me?"

  Right then, I spotted Daisy halfway down the crowded hallway, her head down. "Daisy!" I shouted. She kept walking, so I yelled again, louder. She looked up and picked her way toward us through the crowd.

  I pulled her and Mychal together. "Both of you can talk to me about each other, but you can't talk to each other about each other. And you're going to fix that, because it's annoying. Cool? Cool. I have to go to history."

  Daisy texted me during class. Thanks for that. We've decided to just be friends.

  Me: Cool.

  Her: But the kind of friends who kiss right after deciding to just be friends.

  Me: I'm sure this will work out perfectly.

  Her: Everything always does.

  Since I had my phone out, and we were watching a video in class anyway, I decided to text Davis. Sorry not to reply for so long. Hi. I miss you.

  He wrote back immediately. When can I see you?

  Me: Tomorrow?

  Him: Seven at Applebee's?

  Me: Sounds good.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I THOUGHT I'D BE FINE driving Mom's silver Toyota Camry to Applebee's that night, but I couldn't shake memories of the accident. It seemed surreal and miraculous to me that so many cars could drive past one another without colliding, and I felt certain that each set of headlights headed my way would inevitably veer into my path. Remembered the crunching sound of Harold's death, the silence that followed, the agony in my ribs. Thought about the biggest part being the part that hurts, about my dad's phone, gone forever. Tried to let myself have the thoughts, because to deny them was to just let them take over. It sort of worked--like everything else.

  I made it to Applebee's fifteen minutes early. Davis was already there, and he hugged me in the entryway before we got seated. A thought appeared in my mind undeniable as the sun in a clear sky: He's going to want to put his bacteria in your mouth.

  "Hi," I said.

  "I missed you," he said.

  After the nervous-making car trip, my brain was revving up. I told myself that having a thought was not dangerous, that thoughts aren't actions, that thoughts are just thoughts.

  Dr. Karen Singh liked to say that an unwanted thought was like a car driving past you when you're standing on the side of the road, and I told myself I didn't have to get into that car, that my moment of choice was not whether to have the thought, but whether to be carried away by it.

  And then I got in the car.

  I sat down in the booth and instead of sitting across from me, he sat next to me, his hip against mine. "I talked to your mom a few times," he said. "I think she's coming around to me."

  Who cares if he wants his bacteria in my mouth? Kissing is nice. Kissing feels good. I want to kiss him. But you don't want to get campylobacter. I won't. You'll be sick for weeks. Might have to take antibiotics. Stop. Then you'll get C. diff. Or you'll get Epstein-Barr from the campylobacter. Stop. That could paralyze you, all because you kissed him when you didn't even actually want to because it's fucking gross, inserting your tongue into someone else's mouth. "Are you there?" he asked.

  "What, yeah," I said.

  "I asked how you're feeling."

  "Good," I said. "Honestly not good right now, but good in general."

  "Why not good right now?"

  "Can you sit across from me?"

  "Um, yeah, of course." He got up and moved around to the opposite bench, which made me feel better. For a moment, anyway.

  "I can't do this," I said.

  "Can't do what?"

  "This," I said. "I can't, Davis. I don't know if I'll ever be able to. Like, I know you're waiting for me to get better, and I really appreciate all your texts and everything. It's . . . it's incredibly sweet, but, like, this is probably what better looks like for me."

  "I like this you."

  "No, you don't. You want to make out and sit on the same side of the table and do other normal couple things. Because of course you do."

  He didn't say anything for a minute. "Maybe you just don't find me attractive?"

  "It's not that," I said.

  "But maybe
it is."

  "It's not. It's not that I don't want to kiss you or that I don't like kissing or whatever. I . . . my brain says that kissing is one of a bunch of things that will, like, kill me. Like, actually kill me. But it's not even about dying, really--like, if I knew I was dying, and I kissed you good-bye, literally my last thought wouldn't be about the fact that I was dying; it would be about the eighty million microbes that we'd just exchanged. I know that when you just touched me, it didn't give me a disease, or it probably didn't. God, I can't even say that it definitely didn't because I'm so fucking scared of it. I can't even call it anything but it, you know? I just can't."

  I could tell I was hurting him. I could see it in the way he kept blinking. I could see that he didn't understand it, that he couldn't. I didn't blame him. It made no sense. I was a story riddled with plot holes.

  "That sounds really scary," he said. I just nodded. "Do you feel like you're getting better?" Everyone wanted me to feed them that story--darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.

  "Maybe," I said. "Honestly, I feel really fragile. I feel like I've been taped back together."

  "I know that feeling."

  "How are you?" I asked.

  He shrugged.

  "How's Noah?" I asked.

  "Not good."

  "Um, unpack that for me," I said.

  "He just misses Dad. It's like Noah's two people, almost: There's the miniature dudebro who drinks bad vodka and is the king of his little gang of eighth-grade pseudo-badasses. And then the kid who crawls into bed with me some nights and cries. It's almost like Noah thinks if he screws up enough, Dad will be forced to come out of hiding."

  "He's heartbroken," I said.

  "Yeah, well. Aren't we all. It's . . . I don't really want to talk about my life, if that's okay." It occurred to me that Davis probably liked what infuriated Daisy--that I didn't ask too many questions. Everyone else was so relentlessly curious about the life of the billionaire boy, but I'd always been too stuck inside myself to interrogate him.

  Slowly, the conversation sputtered. We started talking to each other like people who used to be close--catching each other up on our lives rather than living them together. By the time he paid the bill, I knew that whatever we'd been, we weren't anymore.

  Still, once I was home and under the covers, I texted him. You around?

  You can't do it the other way, he replied. And I can't do it this way.

  Me: Why?

  Him: It makes me feel like you only like me at a distance. I need to be liked close up.

  I kept typing and deleting, typing and deleting. I never ended up replying.

  --

  The next day at school, I was walking across the cafeteria to our lunch table when I was intercepted by Daisy. "Holmesy, we have to talk privately." She sat me down at a mostly empty lunch table, a few seats away from some freshmen.

  "Did you break up with Mychal again?"

  "No, of course not. The magic of being Just Friends is that you can't break up. I feel like I've unlocked the secret of the universe with this Just Friends thing. But no, we're going on an adventure."

  "We are?"

  "Do you feel like you've recovered your wits enough that you could, for instance, sneak underneath the city of Indianapolis to attend a guerrilla art show?"

  "A what?"

  "Okay, so remember how I had that idea for Mychal to make those photographic montages of exonerated prisoners?"

  "Well, it was mostly his i--"

  "Let's not get lost in the details, Holmesy. The point is he made it and submitted it to this supercool arts collective Known City, and they are putting it in this one-night-only gallery show they're doing Friday night called Underground Art, where they turn part of the Pogue's Run tunnel into an art gallery." Pogue's Run was the tunnel that emptied into the White River that Pickett's company had been hired to expand, the work they'd never finished. Seemed an odd place for an art show.

  "I don't really want to spend Friday night at an illegal art gallery."

  "It's not illegal. They have permission. It's just super underground. Like, literally underground." I scrunched up my face. "It's like the coolest thing ever to happen in Indianapolis, and my Just Friend has art in the show. Obviously don't feel obligated to be there, but . . . do be there."

  "I don't want to be a third wheel."

  "I am going to be nervous and surrounded by people cooler than me and I'd really like my best friend to be there."

  I opened the Ziploc bag containing my peanut butter and honey sandwich and took a bite.

  "You're thinking about it," she said, excitement in her voice.

  "I'm thinking about it," I allowed.

  And then, after I swallowed, I said, "All right, let's do it."

  "Yes! Yes! We will pick you up at six fifteen on Friday; it's going to be amazing."

  The way she smiled at me made it impossible not to smile back. In a quiet voice, not even sure she could hear me, I said, "I love you, Daisy. I know you say that to me all the time and I never say it, but I do. I love you."

  "Ahh, fuck. Don't go all soft on me, Holmesy."

  --

  Mychal and Daisy showed up at my doorstep at six fifteen sharp. She was wearing a dress-and-tights combo dwarfed by her huge puffer coat, and Mychal was wearing a silver-gray suit that was slightly too big for him. I had on a long-sleeve T-shirt, jeans, and a coat. "I didn't know I was supposed to dress up for the sewer," I said sheepishly.

  "The art sewer." Daisy smiled. I wondered whether maybe I should change, but she just grabbed me and said, "Holmesy, you look radiant. You look like . . . like yourself."

  I sat in one of the backseats in Mychal's minivan, and as he drove south on Michigan Road, Daisy started playing one of our favorite songs, "You're the One." Mychal was laughing as Daisy and I screamed the lyrics to each other. She sang lead, and I belted out the background voice that just repeated, "You're everything everything everything," and I felt like I was. You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.

  As Daisy switched the song to a romantic ballad that she and Mychal were singing, I started thinking about turtles all the way down. I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.

  --

  Mychal turned off Michigan at Tenth Street, and we drove for a while until we reached a pool supply store with a flickering backlit sign saying ROSENTHAL POOLS. The parking lot was already half full. Daisy stopped the music as Mychal pulled into a spot. We got out and found ourselves surrounded by a weird mix of twenty-something hipsters and middle-aged couples. Everyone but us seemed to know one another, and the three of us stood next to Mychal's car for a long time in silence, just watching the scene, until a middle-aged woman in an all-black outfit walked over and said, "Are you here for the event?"

  "I'm, um, Mychal Turner," Mychal said. "I have a, um, a picture in the show."

  "Prisoner 101?"

  "Yeah. That's me."

  "I'm Frances Oliver. I think Prisoner 101 is one of the strongest pieces in the gallery. And I'm the curator, so I should know. Come, come, let's head on down together. I would be fascinated to learn more about your process."

  Frances and Mychal began walking across the parking lot, but every few seconds Frances would pause and say, "Oh, I must introduce you to . . ." and we'd stop for a while to meet an artist or a collector or a "funding partner." Slowly, he was swallowed by all the people who loved Prisoner 101 and wanted to talk with him about it, and after we stood behind him for a while, Daisy finally grabbed him by the hand and said, "We're gonna head down to the show. Enjoy this. I'm so proud of you."

  "I can come with," he said, turning away from a gaggle o
f art students from Herron, the art college in town.

  "No, have fun. You gotta meet all these people, so they'll buy your pictures." He smiled, kissed her, and returned to his crowd of fans.

  When Daisy and I reached the edge of the parking lot, we saw through the trees a flashlight waving back and forth in the air, so we wound our way down a little hill toward the light until the brush opened up into a wide concrete basin. A tiny stream of water--I could easily step over it--bubbled along its bottom. We walked toward the bearded man waving the flashlight, who introduced himself as Kip and handed us hard hats with lanterns and a flashlight. "Follow the tunnel in for two hundred yards, then take your first left, and you'll be in the gallery."

  The light from my helmet followed the creek downstream. In the distance, I could see the start of the tunnel, a light-sucking square cut into a hillside. There was an overturned shopping cart just outside the start of the culvert, trapped against a moss-covered boulder. As we walked toward the tunnel's entrance, I looked up at the black silhouettes of leafless maple trees splitting up the sky.

  The creek ran along the left side of the Pogue's Run tunnel; we walked on a slightly elevated concrete sidewalk to the right of the creek. The smell enveloped us immediately--sewage and the sickly sweet smell of rot. I thought my nose would get used to it, but it never did.

  A few steps in, we began to hear rodents scurrying along the creek bed. We could hear voices, too--echoey, unintelligible conversations that seemed to be coming from all sides of us. Our headlamps lit up the graffiti that lined the walls--spray-painted tags in bubble letters, but also stenciled images and messages. Daisy's light lingered on one image featuring a portly rat drinking a bottle of wine with the caption, THE RAT KING KNOWS YOUR SECRETS. Another message, scrawled in what looked like white house paint, read, IT'S NOT HOW YOU DIE. IT'S WHO YOU DIE.

  "This is a little creepy," Daisy whispered.

  "Why are you whispering?"

  "Scared," she whispered. "Has it been two hundred yards yet?"

  "Dunno," I said. "But I hear people up there." I turned around and shone my light back toward the tunnel's entrance, and a couple of middle-aged men behind us waved. "See, it's fine."

  The creek wasn't really a body of water anymore so much as a slow-moving puddle; I watched a rat scamper across it without ever getting its nose wet. "That was a rat," Daisy said, her voice clenched.