The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

by Patrick Somerville

  To fill this embarrassing time of someone else’s unconsciousness, Alex picked up the kid’s bike and leaned away from it, as though inspecting the purity of the frame.

  Satisfied with the angles he saw, he carefully leaned the bike against the side of the building and went back to the kid.

  “He’s fine. Look.” He pointed. “He breathes.”

  A minute later, the kid was sitting against the brick wall that was the side of Alex’s store, sipping at the very Diet Dr. Pepper Alex had thrown at him, waiting for Alex to re-emerge with ice for his head. Alex had not requisitioned the candy bars on his way back in, I noticed. Guilt.

  The kid stared coolly at me.

  I was beginning to feel a little too caught up in the incident. I had just been on my way to buy an apple. I was innocent.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” I told him. “You might have a concussion.”

  “Fuck you, dude,” said the kid, shaking his head and pursing his lips at me. “That shit was assault.”

  “I don’t think it counts if you’re a robber.”

  “Fuck you, dude,” he said again. “It’s still assault.”

  The farm animal comment requires explanation. I do want, though, a discussion of love, ultimately, because that’s the focus of this story, and I’m not sure it’s important for you to know this part about the fire. But who am I to omit? I’ve decided that one can’t tell about these things, and that the feeling matters more than what happened. This Dr. Pepper incident, and my subsequent date with Alex’s daughter, came on a Thursday. The previous Tuesday was the day, as I said, I had sent away my medical school applications. It had been a nightmare of paperwork, more than I ever knew it would be when I first began filling out forms, and honestly, had I understood the amount of work just to get in, I probably would have found a different career. God forbid my future self being able to contact—via new time travel technologies—that version of me and describe what it would be like after the school, in residency, or after that. My hospital at this very moment is being eaten by an HMO that I think about in terms of Pac-Man, and the insurance costs alone have cut so far into our cash flow that yard work is looking like a good alternative business. Being an ER doctor is like being an astronaut; it sounds cool until you accidentally fly the ship into the sun, or you forget to turn on the oxygen before you go to sleep, or your partner forgets to recharge your jetpack before a spacewalk, and you float off, at three miles per hour, infinitely. It’s then—a key moment in all lives—when the optimism of your dreams becomes stupid.

  I couldn’t quit at that point. I had just spent two years back in college hanging out with nineteen year-olds who called me Dad because I was 30, getting through the prerequisites, and now there was nowhere else to go but forward. In a sense I already was that astronaut. I dropped the envelopes into the blue mailbox on the corner, and to reward myself on that Tuesday, I decided to drive out of the city and to get into the countryside. I didn’t know where to go, not really, and so I just got onto the expressway and headed south, deciding I would pull off whenever things looked rural enough, find some field somewhere, and start walking and getting in touch with my deepest and most complex emotions, which you have greater access to when you are near trees.

  When I parked at a gas station I was probably forty miles south of Beverly, and there was nothing around but farms, their fields, and a few patches of woods here and there.

  For no reason I bought a bottle of Gatorade at the gas station, then asked the guy behind the counter whether there were any big parks around.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  He was disappointingly American in all ways, and I wished I was back home, in my neighborhood. There are all different degrees and qualities of transactions with anonymous vendors; you can be blocked from the start or you can immediately be pulled in to someone else’s kindness, someone else’s world, by a look. Not unlike love. A comment about the weather can be a bridge. If I want anything in my life, I want bridges.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Something with trails. Or like a bridge going over a creek?”

  “There’s some ATV trails back that way.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said. “Just for walking.”

  He started laughing at that. I left the gas station, trying to hold my head up, gripping my Gatorade as though it were a source of dignity, which is in fact the opposite of what a bottle of Gatorade is.

  Standing beside my car in the parking lot, I looked out at the nearby wall of trees and thought to myself that this was as good a place as any. I went in. There didn’t seem to be any sort of path, but that didn’t matter; three feet in and I had forgotten the man behind the counter and felt the feeling I had been looking for: the dampening of the noises around you, the calm, the noble trees themselves, each a singular history, a life form and system in and of itself, and then you, silly as you are with your human-being accoutrements, a couple floppy arms and legs and a pail full of wet organs in the middle (how could we not need love?). Trees, I thought. Trees are the things with dignity. I thought of Corinne, and how her body was leaner, and had a tougher edge to it than mine. That if she were an elegant white birch then I was at best a blue spruce suffering from canker. My softness was embarrassing.

  She was, I’d suspected since we met, a better person than me. She hadn’t figured it out yet, but I’d known it all along. What was going to happen to us? Could you meet somebody like I had met her, fall in love, and a few months later be together at the front end of a lifetime’s marriage? I had taken to thinking about the relationship in terms of months. If it was going to work, it was going to be 480 months. 480. I considered the length of a month, the amount of events that could occur inside of just one, the way a given August could stretch out and feel endless. I tried to multiply that feeling by 480 and could not get a sense of it. I thought about how strange it was that we are given a whole life and not enough brainpower to appreciate even its outline. Then I looked up and realized I was standing in front of a burning barn.

  It was an old barn, and red, just like you would imagine a barn if I asked you to imagine a barn, which is what I’m asking you to do now, I suppose. The roof was entirely engulfed, and inside I imagined piles of hay going up faster than tanks of gasoline. There was no one around; no Mennonite women running through the fields, their shawls and dresses billowing behind them, no farm families huddled beside a well, the father dumping pails of water over the children’s heads to protect them, no stampede of horses, no telling, overturned lantern beside a guilty-looking cow. I could see a house a half-mile away, in a haze, but no cars, no trucks, no people anywhere. There were no sirens, no neighbors rushing forward to take charge. Just a barn and flames, and me, small person on a nature hike, watching.

  And hearing some bleating.

  Let’s be clear: I don’t want to be thought of as a hero for this. And I have no explanation for why a barn full of hay would contain one small goat. But I will say this: I surprised myself with my ability to not only enter a dangerous situation and to put myself at risk but to do so for no reason other than the sound of a bleat, the guess at a life. Perhaps I was a little suicidal, okay. Again, I think of the mysteries of personhood and connection. I have already mentioned the bridges.

  The goat was crouched low in the corner of the building, and I made my way as quickly as I could, one arm raised up in front of my face to shield me from the waves of cracklingly hot air that whipped through the barn’s interior, thinking, as I hoisted it up onto my shoulder and then did my best to run, to actually run from the barn with this thing, its little hooves digging into my back, through the cotton of my T-shirt, that who this was for, really, was Corinne, the girl I didn’t know very well, but whom I loved. Maybe there was something here, when I told her the story—I imagined it happening in the car, just after I’d picked her up from the airport, myself cast as hero, her falling in deeper—that we could both inject into those 480 months, and voilà, there’s a life.
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br />   Alex had a daughter named Matilda. Unlike him, she spoke with an American accent, and by all accounts had grown up in the States. She wore sweatsuits, and had a lazy beauty to her; she usually looked like she was either about to go to bed or was just getting out of bed. Her face could sometimes be caked with foundation. You would see her because she sometimes worked the counter in the afternoons. Once when I went in I got my milk from the cooler and then pointed at her T-shirt.

  “I went to Wisconsin, too,” I said. “I didn’t know you went there. Don’t you miss it?” I had seen her enough times to speak to her like we were friends.

  She said, “God, I’m so glad I’m not you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Bougie frat-boy college sentimentality,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I so know you.”

  “So you’re saying you didn’t like it?”

  “I studied yeast cultures for four years straight and didn’t talk to anyone at that school. That milk is $4.27.”

  The day of the Dr. Pepper, Matilda pulled up out front in her Toyota Camry a few minutes after Alex had sent the kid away. Alex and I were inside the store, watching Bob Ross painting on the tiny television.

  “I love this guy,” Alex was saying, shaking his head as Bob Ross worked on the sky. He looked at me.

  “He is amazing, no?” He patted me on the shoulder, as though I had sculpted Bob Ross out of magical clay and then brought him to life.

  “He is,” I said. “Was. Yes.”

  Alex looked at me, eyes wide. “Was?” he asked. “He is dead now?”

  I nodded.

  “Only in America,” Alex said, turning back to the television.

  Just then Matilda came in, looked at me and at her father, and said, “What’s on fire?”

  I had been having some trouble getting the smell out. It had to have been in my hair, but no amount of shampooing had helped.

  “I was involved in a barn fire on Tuesday,” I offered. I didn’t mention that currently, the small goat was back in my apartment, and was engaged, I would find later, in eating my couch.

  (I had a habit of trying to make pets, to rescue things. There were other examples, but you understand the basics. I also have other personality traits. But this one matters most—that is why I’m telling this story. I liked the feeling of reaching out for other minds, human being or otherwise, and drawing them near to me and my own. I liked to think that other people could perhaps even become you and you could become them if you pulled them close enough. Love is just as much about the relief of no longer being yourself than it is about other people.)

  “You two,” Alex said. “Why don’t you two go down to the hot dog stand together?” He winked at me. Alex had been wanting me to take Matilda out for months. Never mind she had an engagement ring on her finger. It was, I think, an extension of his obsession with assimilation. Yes, he could wear his Cubs sweatshirts and watch his Bob Ross, but the ultimate coup, I think, would have been to marry his daughter off to a product of the American suburbs. The neighborhood white kid—weirdo or not. Coup against whom or what I wasn’t sure—Alex’s wife and mother both wore robes and headscarves inside of the liquor store, but no burqas or veils. Considering they spent their days owning and operating a liquor store, their connection to Islam seemed to be, at best, tenuous.

  I didn’t understand the situation, in the end, the situation of Alex’s family in America—who had made whom move where, who wanted to be here, who did not. Whose life had been destroyed to come. Whose love was fading because of it.

  I looked at Matilda, expecting her to be rolling her eyes at me, but instead I saw that she had an amiable look on her face, and said, “Sure. I’m starving.”

  Alex, beaming, opened the register and gave us four dollars in quarters.

  “You kids have fun,” he said.

  We walked down Damen on our way to the hot dog stand. On the way, I told her about what had happened with the Diet Dr. Pepper. She laughed at that.

  “He hates stealing so much,” she said. “He gets insane. But he loves all the kids in this neighborhood, too. He has a temper.”

  “I wonder if there’s a physiology to temper,” I said. “I wonder if we can quantify it.”

  “Nice questions,” she said. “Nice investigation of the world.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic,” I said. “The other person has to be able to tell if you really want it to be sarcasm.”

  “I could sneer more.”

  “Try that.”

  We walked the rest of the way with her practicing different sneers. I would say something I guessed she’d find stupid and she would respond with different sneers and tones of voice and then I would rate the quality of her sarcasm.

  “I really like the sit-com Wings,” I said.

  “Oh, so do I,” she said. When she said the word “I” she bared her teeth and opened her eyes wide and raised her nose up so high she seemed like a pig.

  “That was good,” I said. “Here’s another one. They say that for one of the first times in America, the younger generation will not be able to make as much money as their parents’ generation.”

  “That’s so interesting,” she said, but she said “interesting” without moving her lips at all, which was amazing in its own right.

  “That was good too.”

  “The ending of Cocoon,” I said, “is underappreciated by serious film critics.”

  “ObVioUSLy!!!!”

  Matilda ordered a dog with everything and I felt compelled to order the same. That’s the kind of person she was, I was realizing, the kind of person you wanted to emulate but the kind of person you knew would be able to see clearly your ambition to emulate. But I couldn’t help myself. She could see and I could see her seeing.

  “So who are you marrying?” I asked her, after we’d started in on the dogs.

  “A guy,” she said. “His name’s Faruk.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Computer,” she shrugged, and despite only one non-plural word I understood what she meant. Squinting, tapping at a keyboard, and a lot of money.

  “Is he American?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s why my dad wants me to marry you.”

  “He doesn’t really want that, though.”

  “Yes,” she said, “he does.”

  It couldn’t actually be true.

  “Does your dad know my name?”

  She looked at me. “I’m not sure I know your name,” she admitted.

  “Well,” I said. “That makes two of you.”

  I finished eating in silence, wondering what it would be like to marry Matilda. It seemed, actually, possible. Sort of. I let it be possible, let’s say. I had eaten many jalapeño peppers, and I was sweating—I was in a heightened state, and I wasn’t thinking straight. But this is my problem, this has always been my problem—I fall in love all the time. Too easily, obviously, and with everyone and everything. Think of me as a Love Monster.

  “Faruk is a hard person to know,” she said. “My dad doesn’t like him. He reminds him too much of back home.”

  “So the war,” I said, thinking of the most sober, unromantic topic I could come up with. “What do you think of it?”

  “I mean I don’t want my brother to get killed. But I’m for Saddam being killed.”

  “That’s—”

  “What?” she asked. “Too hawkish for you? Coming from a young woman? Of color?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you’d be against it,” she said. “Of course you’re the young liberal white guy who’s against it. How could you not be? But have you really thought about it? It’s so simple. Do you want more or less tyrants in power in the world? Tyrants who kill people for no reason?”

  “Less,” I said, “but that’s not—”

  “You’re again predictable.”

  “Listen, Christopher Hitchens,” I said. “Hold on. First of all, you’re allowed to have this opinion beca
use you’re Iraqi.”

  “Allowed. And why are you not allowed?”

  “Because I would be an asshole if I had that opinion.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m the young white American.”

  “I’m American too,” she said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “This country,” she said, shaking her head, “is so fucked.”

  My married life with Matilda had puppies in it, I don’t know why. Later, when I would close my eyes and imagine it, imagine her naked, near-perfect body above me as we moved together in our dim, very bourgeoisie master bedroom, her face finally makeup-free, our central air cooling the whole place, even after Corinne was back, and then later, after she’d left me, I’d see Matilda look down at me through half-closed slits of eyes as sweat glistened on her forehead near the end of making love, black hair hanging just above her breasts, lulled into my own dreams, this unbearably beautiful insouciant Iraqi woman, wrists bent, hands pressing down onto my shoulders, happy. I saw us owning a home, something safe, and in the backyard there would live 800 or 900 puppies.

  The hot dog date ended in a way that was surprisingly reminiscent of the way things had ended between me and the burglar kid, out on the street—Matilda simply looking at me with a kind of frown after our debate about the war, not talking on the way back. No more games about sarcasm. No bridges whatsoever. We’d had, literally, a twenty-second window of what to me had felt like love. That is easy love. It comes and goes, but has no staying power.

  I don’t think of love in terms of relationships. It happens in terms of seconds, but goes away like that, too. I pass a nurse, I love her, it ends when I go around the corner; at a restaurant I see a forlorn man at the table next to me, and I love him, and the conversation pulls me back, and it’s ended. A patient comes in, and she is sick, and I love her, and then she dies, and I never see her again. This is what I live for. Don’t think that it’s sad.

  I just had a kid who died.

  He was in his twenties—he’d been stabbed by an insane man.