Awake in the World
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For Connie and Seth, without whom this book simply wouldn’t exist
Even if it’s very late at night. Someone’s always awake in the world.
—Ann Druyan, A Famous Broken Heart
I believe that it is very difficult to know who we are until we understand where and when we are. I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky.
—Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.
—Ann Druyan, “Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe … and Carl Sagan,” Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2003
PART ONE
September 2012
1
Zach
Top three unluckiest things to happen to me this week:
1. I dropped my house key into a storm drain.
2. Ms. Grace informed me that I’m one credit short for graduation next spring.
3. I tore Dad’s hoodie.
And it’s only Monday.
The hoodie pissed me off the most. The impound lot is fenced in with chain link, and the twisty-tie barbs atop the fence are as sharp as upturned ice picks. I dropped to the other side of the fence and examined the rip. I could see my jeans through it. Damn.
I hefted my backpack and moved through a thicket of rusted Hondas and forgotten Toyotas toward the lot’s oddest resident: the fishing boat. Behind it, a sign hung on the impound lot’s fence:
SMILE, YOU’RE BEING WATCHED
Below the words was a picture of a camera with an eyeball for a lens.
But there weren’t actually any cameras. I was certain of that. I’d managed to escape detection all this time, despite some close calls, but I sometimes wondered if it was because I was just that stealthy … or if I was fooling myself. Maybe everyone knew about my secret predawn infiltrations. Maybe they left me alone because they felt sorry for me. It’s like this: Sometimes it feels like the whole town is waiting to see what wallop of bad luck will hit me next; other times, I can feel them quietly rooting for me. I’m never certain which is true when.
On the boat, inside the wheelhouse, I sank into the old captain’s chair and snapped on the deck lantern. The warm orange glow chased the shadows from the walls, where my father’s face stared down at me from a hundred tacked-up sketches.
“Morning, Dad,” I said softly.
I opened my sketchbook and returned to an illustration in progress. Sometimes this was my only time to draw, these early hours on an impounded, slowly rotting boat. Between school and my job at the market, and the girls and their homework, and their bedtime stories—well, I didn’t have space for much more than that. Quietly, I roughed in the structure of my father’s boat on the page. It peeked through the haze of the marine layer, the shroud that blanketed the sea on early summer mornings.
The sketchbook was a gift from my father in 2008, which had been a good year until it wasn’t. “Things are going to change,” Dad had said to Mama after the promotion at Bernaco. And he was right: They had, although not exactly how I think he’d intended. He’d given me a stack of sketchbooks like this one: bound in leather, or something like it; expensive, toothy paper. “I’m tired of seeing you draw on the gas bill,” he’d said with a wink. Between then and now, I’d filled every inch of every page of each book, except this one. This was the last of them. Nothing I’d drawn in this book seemed good enough.
Not for the last thing my father ever gave me.
The pencil broke, etching a dark gash on the page. I sighed. I could fix it, but … The weight of the previous day had settled on me, and I was tired. I went to the window and pulled back the blanket that hung across it. From here I could see the credit union sign announce the time: 3:35 A.M.
I bagged my sketchbook, extinguished the lantern, and closed the wheelhouse door. When I dropped to the ground beside the boat, my ankle rolled beneath me, and I clapped a hand over my mouth to stifle a cry. I tested the foot gingerly. It wasn’t serious—not a break or a sprain—but it qualified, I thought, as a small warning from the universe.
Remember whose side I’m on.
Yeah. Not mine. Got it, universe.
I tugged my hood over my head, then carefully scaled the fence and limped home, aware, as always, that when luck goes bad, it tends to stay bad. Some things just don’t change.
2
Vanessa
The stranger rolled his ankle when he landed, and I cringed. I’d done that a few times, back when Mom and I played on the Santa Barbara public tennis courts. Those memories always ended with Mom helping me to the car. But the stranger limped away, and I reviewed my notes: I didn’t know who he was, or why he broke into that lot a couple of times each week, or what appeal that old boat held. And yet, we weren’t so different, except maybe for the breaking and entering. Two souls, wide awake in the most wee of hours.
I’d found him entirely by accident, of course. Mom and I had just moved into Aaron’s house in the hills of Orilla del Cielo. From the window of my new room, I had a panoramic view of Orilly and the Pacific beyond. (That’s what everyone calls the town, I quickly learned. As in O, RLY?) The vista was lovely, but it held secrets, too. Aaron had pointed out the scars left by a severe storm that hit the coast years before: an abandoned trawler, moldering on the rocks, saw grass growing through holes in its hull; the rubble of an old stone pier that had collapsed, dumping Aaron’s favorite seafood restaurant into the sea. And despite the million-dollar view, Orilly is an oil town, strictly blue collar. Bernaco Oil, where Aaron works, owns most of the land, and its drilling platforms stand like sentries offshore, watching the townspeople. It’s the polar opposite of Santa Barbara, where I’d lived before and where one might bump into Rob Lowe at the supermarket or sell Girl Scout cookies to Oprah. Orilly has no such glamour. There isn’t even a movie theater. Highway 1 serves as a neat seam, separating the town into two halves: the hills, where Aaron and the rest of the oil executives live among bright lawns and lush eucalyptus groves, and the lowlands, where the oil workers are stuffed into little boxes among nail salons and strip malls.
But that view. The sunsets, practically nuclear, transform the ocean each night into a shimmering golden blanket. The grimy, bulky oil rigs become blazing, floating cities, strung across the horizon like Christmas lights.
That view is the reason OSPERT has a permanent home in my window, and the reason I spotted the stranger. OSPERT is my Orion SpaceProbe Equatorial Reflector Telescope. He’s got an aluminum Newtonian optical tube, a rack-and-pinion focuser, and two Kellner eyepieces. All of which means he’s exceptionally good at tracking anything that moves: comets, the International Space Station, Mars.
And strangers who break into the police impound lot.
I found him becau
se of Twylight Guy, a weekend stargazer who keeps an amateur-astronomy blog. That night, weeks and weeks ago, TG was all lit up about a supernova: Supposed to be a real light show, he’d exclaimed. And that was good for me, because if TG could see something, then I probably could, too; he blogs from Monterey, just a short hop from Orilly. You’d expect an exploding star to dominate the night sky, but alas, even the brightest supernovae are hardly more than a pale smudge among the stars. The magic, though, isn’t in what they look like, but in what they are: the final echo of a stunning symphony, performed a million miles away, a thousand thousand years ago. They’re a flourish of history, preserved against the cape of night.
Unfortunately, while TG is a perfectly competent astronomer, he’s a shitty meteorologist.
Supernova a bust
by Twylight Guy|June 23, 2012 • 1:48 a.m.
Sorry, folks! Low pressure system from the northwest made its way down the coast late last night, effectively ruining any West Coasters’ chance of seeing PSN J11085663 + 2635300. Major bummer. International folks, send your own photos so those of us in the dark (LOL, in the dark) don’t miss out!
Major bummer, indeed. I’d loaded up on caffeine and couldn’t sleep. So instead, I turned OSPERT toward the earth, adjusting the finderscope until I found the oil rigs, glowing in the dark. Even that late, they were alive with activity. Eventually, I turned the telescope toward Orilly itself. And that’s how I spotted the stranger. He was practically the only thing moving at that hour. He wasn’t hard to spot.
Jesus, if Mom knew I was spying on people … I could just imagine the headlines.
LOCAL VOYEUR STRIKES AGAIN
Peeping teen allegedly points telescope down, not up; neighbors scandalized
But Orilly was dead tired, everyone asleep. Nobody would know.
Anyway, Mom already felt scandalized by OSPERT. And the stars, and the Carl Sagan posters, and the Cornell pennant tacked to my bulletin board. Though, of course, her true feelings had nothing to do with any of those things, and everything to do with my father.
Who I don’t think about.
Below me, the stranger limped into shadow. With a yawn, I covered OSPERT’s big glass eye with the lens cap and dragged myself to bed.
3
Zach
The administrative office of Palmer Rankin High School hummed to life around me. Derek—my older brother—was somewhere in the back offices, meeting with Ms. Grace, my adviser, about that missing course credit.
So I waited.
Always with the waiting. When you’re a kid, that’s just the way it is: You wait for the bus. Wait for the bell. Wait for summer, the weekend. Wait to grow up. Except then you do grow up, and you realize adults are always waiting, too. Waiting for a paycheck, for a letter from the lawyer, for your food stamps. Waiting forever for that moment when something just clicks, and your life finally turns into the life you thought you’d have.
You wait and wait and wait, and then, as you wait some more, you die. It’s morbid.
While waiting, I opened my sketchbook. As I worked, the world went out of focus, until there was just me and the page. Me and the eraser, reminding the clock on the gash I’d created the night before. Drawing was always like this for me. It opened a tiny rip in the universe. Time didn’t exist there. Except time kept on existing for everyone else, and that fact had gotten me in trouble more than once. Most of my parent-teacher conferences, at least in my younger days, had been about my attention span.
Well, except one of them. The inciting event happened during lunch period in fourth grade. I’d filled a sheet of notebook paper with graphite, save a little twisting ribbon of white in the middle: a firework, captured in the moment of its unfolding, streamers of negative space rippling out from its warm heart. And then Bobby Longdale poured a carton of milk onto the drawing, destroying it. It was lasagna day, which is important because Bobby wound up wearing his, and I wound up in the principal’s office, waiting for my mother. Dad had the car for work, which meant that Mama walked a few miles in the heat because of my stunt. And though I knew that, I still snapped at her when she reached for my hand on the walk home. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember what Dad had to say when he came home later. He put away his dive gear, then came to my room, sat on the bed, and explained the difference between being human and being angry. He wasn’t mad that I’d acted out at school; I’d done so with cause. He was disappointed that I’d taken it out on my mother. Recognize the people in your life who give you love, he said to me that afternoon. Give love back. Just love.
Wait for your father to come home, Mama had said.
Remembering that day hurt. I blinked to clear my eyes.
I wish I could wait, Mama. I’d wait a thousand years for him. I’d take a thousand lectures.
Derek’s lectures weren’t quite the same, though he tried. Right now he’d be listening to Ms. Grace say something about not applying myself. Please, Derek would sniff. The boy applies too much of himself. He works two jobs. I can’t stop him. I’ve tried. What do you want from him?
None of this was new territory for me. For us.
Outside the office, the rest of the world swam past. Students chattering excitedly. The same conversations every day. Back and forth, wielding their opinions like knives, jabbing one another to see who bleeds more for the things they love. Stab, stab. Mama would have taken a lighter view: Maybe they’re just passionate about things. But I’m less reasonable, especially on days that begin with Ms. Grace reporting about my squandered potential.
Potential is for people who are going places. But where am I going?
I fanned through the pages of my sketchbook. Page after page of intricate illustrations. Dense clouds spilling over mountaintops; a tree, split by lightning, smoldering. I was good, I knew that. But it didn’t matter. You can’t support a family with nice drawings. And anyway, artists were supposed to know what they were about. I had no idea what my art was about. If someone asked me to make an artistic statement, what could I say?
My father gave me this book, and I loved him.
I leaned back in my chair. For the first time, I noticed the fine layer of white dust on the other chairs in the waiting area, heard the din of power tools somewhere above. The ceiling tiles vibrated as I watched, coughing up more dust, and a piece of paper fluttered down from one wall and came to rest at my feet. It was bright yellow, with screaming type.
PLEASE EXCUSE A MESS; CONSTRUCTION!!!
“Our educators commit the most grievous grammatical atrocities, don’t they?”
I glanced up to see a girl standing near the door. She raised one eyebrow in disapproval, and the corner of her mouth turned up slightly.
Palmer Rankin doesn’t get many new students. People aren’t exactly flocking to Orilly. So when someone transfers in senior year, just in time to mount a serious valedictory challenge to Cecily Vasquez—who was labeled “most likely valedictorian” at my kindergarten “graduation”—it’s difficult not to notice. The new girl and Cece were straight AP kids—except for health education, the random-ass elective that everyone puts off until they can’t anymore. Which makes it the one class I share with both of them.
Despite all that, I couldn’t remember her name.
Thump. Above me, a square ceiling tile bucked and clattered back into place.
“Maybe you should scoot over a few seats?” the girl said, casting a critical eye at the ceiling. Her dark hair fell away, revealing small-gauge eyelets in her ears—I could see right through her earlobe to the hollow behind. I’d never noticed a girl’s jawline before—my observation skills aren’t terrific, except when I’m bent over my sketchbook—but I noticed hers, and the way her neck sloped up to meet it. Over one shoulder she carried a messenger bag; strapped to its buckle was a bicycle helmet. Each of her fingers bore a different ring, sometimes two. Nebula-print leggings, a strappy top, shoulders everywhere.
“So you don’t get hit.”
“What?” I said.
I looked up at the tile. It was motionless. “It … seems fine.”
She shrugged, then lifted one hand dramatically. “Alas,” she said, projecting like a theater student. “How little I knew the young man. A bright future in the arts he might have had.” She dropped the act and grinned. “Or not. I mean, I’ve only seen the one drawing.”
“What?” I struggled to parse her words; she was talking on some frequency that hummed beyond my ability to hear, or maybe faster than I was able to sequence.
She sighed and pointed to the sketchbook. “It’s nice. Your drawing.”
“Wh—” I stopped, realizing I’d been able to keep up with her that time. “Oh. Thanks.”
“I mean, it’s nice for a delinquent,” she added.
“What?” Oh, Zach, goddammit.
She unfurled a hand, gesturing at our surroundings. “The administrative office,” she intoned. “Court of the detestable and ill-behaved. The fuckups, if you will. So what did you do wrong?”
“What?”
This time she looked at me as if she thought I might really be dumb. Some invisible wire strung through my chest twitched. I’d never felt that before. But I didn’t have time to examine that feeling more closely.
“Good morning, Zachariah,” chirped Mrs. Rhyzkov, one of the school’s guidance counselors. “I just saw your brother. Such a pleasure when he comes back to visit. He always was such a determined student, that Derek Mays.”
“It’s Zachary,” I muttered, but the counselor had already turned to the girl.
“Miss Drake, Vanessa, dear,” she said, and I thought, Vanessa, that’s right, I knew that. “Why don’t you come on back? You must be so excited about the college fair this week…”