The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

by Patrick Somerville

  That morning, he does not press for details. The day, from the start, feels somber, as though they’ve walked all this way to attend to a funeral.

  Tom has the helmet strapped to his backpack when she emerges from the rock shower. He’s in the kitchenette, making coffee. His back is to her, and as she looks at the helmet, it occurs to her that it may be strange, to be naked but for a towel, so close to a man she doesn’t really know. And yet she knows him. But he can’t know how well she knows him.

  She stands, dripping, watching him. He’s scrubbing the counters. She feels as though he could be her older brother.

  “Almost ready, then?” she asks.

  He spins. “Howdy,” he says, smiling a little. “I’ll go outside while you get dressed. There’s coffee, yeah.” He nods at it. “Oh, also: it’s a wee bit rainy out there. Wear your jacket.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you,” she says. “It’s hard to describe.”

  “Hey, no worries,” he says. “I know. I mean I don’t, but it’s okay.”

  “It works,” she says. “It really does.”

  “And so that means you saw me?”

  “More like…I was you. Briefly.”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, nodding. She can tell that he’s embarrassed. He turns back to the coffee. It makes her sad again.

  So she’ll wonder about Tom—she really will wonder. She’ll wonder why they said virtually nothing to one another the next day, the whole hike back to the pickup. If anything, should not this wealth of understanding have opened doors between them? Maybe it was too extreme.

  She’ll wonder what it is to really know another person. She will wonder why her grandmother seemed to think that this particular invention would be the thing to stop the war. What could you learn about a Nazi that would make the Nazi make more sense? See that he has children, or that he’s felt pain, too? The string of decisions required to find oneself a member of the party? It seems a worthless thing to do, considering the amount of evil involved. Why understand evil? As she works she will sometimes imagine it, though: Dunkirk, but all the young soldiers creeping through that exodus with helmets on their heads, pointing sticks up at the sky as German pilots dropped their bombs. Pointing them at one another, pointing them at themselves. What could that do? Either way, destruction. In fact, it will seem to her a worse way to die, to bear witness to the cold and mathematical indifference of a man who’s just pushed the button. Whimsy did not trump destruction.

  But why didn’t they say more to each other at the end? That’s what she’ll wonder, and it will seem as though the answer to the question is the same answer to the question of why, in the weeks to come, she will not seriously consider sitting down to write him, to tell him about her progress, to call him, to invite him to join. It could not have been because Grayspool was there, sitting at the wheel of the car, rain coming down, the three of them waiting for Tom to get out, to take his luggage, to get back on the plane, to go home to Chicago as though they’d never met.

  “Well,” Tom says, right then.

  She can hardly look at him.

  “We do all hope you can make some use of that device,” Grayspool says. “Herman had it in his head you were the right man for the job.”

  “That makes no sense,” Tom says.

  He smiles, turns to Eliza. “Goodbye,” he says.

  She manages a smile, turns, hugs him, kisses him softly on the cheek. “Good luck, Tom,” she says. “You’ll do well.”

  “Geez, what’s the big deal?” he says, looking at her. “I’m not about to be executed here.” When she doesn’t smile in return, and instead just nods, he says, “It was nice to get to know you. Good luck with all that Pangea stuff.” And he’s gone.

  She’ll wonder, now and then, even as the weeks go on, even as she slowly begins to page though all her notes on Pangea, as she sets her mind to the task before her. As the lawyers come, as the paperwork begins. As the press catches wind of the massive financial transactions, then catches wind of what she intends to do. As the government begins to come around, to ask their questions, too. As she finds herself with less and less time, with more and more problems, all of them caused by the money. As she slowly learns that there are dangers to this, that it’s not simply whim. That to make an institution like Pangea will instantly create enemies. Thousands of enemies, infuriated at the very thought, let alone the details of her departments as they begin to trickle out. Infuriated at the thought of what is whimsical, strange, unlikely, or magic gaining any foothold anywhere. Whether or not any of it is true. As she slowly sees, too, that she can’t control it.

  Not at all.

  Sometimes, when she gets a moment, she’ll wonder about Tom.

  3

  THE MACHINE OF UNDERSTANDING OTHER PEOPLE

  Tom lives in a part of Chicago sometimes called The Viagra Triangle. It’s real. They call it this because there are—apparently—a lot of men like Tom snurfing around: divorced middle-aged professionals, prowlers reliving their (failed) bachelordom, only this time they’ve got money. Tom was vaguely aware of the neighborhood’s reputation when he signed the lease after the divorce, and for a few months he rode a wave of illusory optimism about his new freedom, even got into the groove at a couple nearby martini bars and tried his hand at talking up some ladies. It had been a long time, but still, he talked his way into a couple of disappointing humps.

  One date was good. She was a blond attorney with a gravelly voice and her name was Katherine. She was a few years older than him, divorced as well, and they’d gotten along okay. Their date was at a place called Joe’s Stone Crab and Big Steak Shack.

  They drank too much; Tom even noticed, as they ate and chatted, that she seemed to pull booze down into her body at a rate far greater than your typical person and a lot closer to his own rate. Kindred spirit. She told him about her daughter, who wanted to be an attorney as well, despite Katherine’s constant warnings.

  “Sometimes you’re talking to them,” she said, “and they’re just hearing the exact opposite of what you’re saying. You know?”

  “That sounds about right,” Tom said. He had no idea.

  “You said you don’t have kids, didn’t you?”

  “Never had a kid,” Tom said. “We thought about it. Time just went by. Never seemed quite right.”

  Katherine smirked a quirky smirk, sipped her drink.

  “My first wife was more interested,” Tom said.

  “First wife?” Katherine said, eyes lighting up a bit, mock-scandalized. “You didn’t tell me you were married twice. Bad!” She chuckled; Tom liked her. He could tell she didn’t care one way or the other. He could tell, too, that she had a nice, easygoing sense of humor.

  “Long time ago,” Tom said. “And it was so short, I don’t think it counts.”

  “I bet they were working you to death at that firm.”

  “Yes,” Tom said. “They were. But that wasn’t the issue.”

  “What was?”

  “Well,” he said. “She died. Actually.”

  “Who? Your wife?”

  Tom nodded.

  “Oh my God,” Katherine said. “I’m so sorry, Jesus. I’m prying.” She looked at her empty plate. “I’m drunk.”

  “No, no,” Tom said. “It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”

  It was also a lie. Well—it was something of a lie. Marianne was dead. She just didn’t die while they were together, and in fact, Tom hadn’t heard from her in at least five years when he heard the news. She’d drowned. Some kind of boating accident with her second husband. Washed up on the shore of Lake Superior. But Marianne had left him much in the same way Sherry had left him. The only difference was how much younger the two of them had been. Both times, all his fault. Totally. No denying it. Tuned out, uncommunicative, distant, vain, detached, unhealthy, completely obsessed with money.

  “It was terrible at the time,” Tom said. Why was he doing this? He did not know. Still, though, he kept going: “But I moved on,” h
e added, and yes, Jesus, he was trying to look thoughtfully sad.

  Two things came of this lie. Tom never knew how direct or indirect the cause-and-effect really was, but the basics were pretty obvious.

  That night, he slept with this Katherine.

  Later—like the next day—is when the downward spiral began.

  Maybe this would only be an unpleasant memory of Tom at his ethical worst—after all, every person has his or her bottom, his or her peak—if you look at your life, you can see your worst moment, too, and you probably recovered from it. I hope you remember it. But there was more. Only a day after his return from England, Katherine called and asked if he wanted to get dinner.

  “We had fun, right?” she said on the phone. “Why didn’t we ever try it again?”

  Because you remind me, Tom thought, of the worst in me.

  “I’m not sure,” Tom said.

  “Well,” she said. “Let’s get sushi. Fuck it.”

  Tom, still a little jet-lagged, almost said no. He didn’t need to be back in that psychic place, especially now that he had this goddamned helmet to deal with, especially now that he’d spent those…days with Eliza. He wasn’t feeling so hot, not hot at all, but Tom was impressed to notice how this was not the same feeling as the feeling of the downward spiral, the feeling before he’d gone to England. This was something new, and it was comfortable in a different way.

  He waffled; she prodded him a bit about his waffling.

  Then she said, “Come aaawwhwhn, Tommy,” in an accent so thick with Chicago he found himself smiling.

  They got real drunk.

  Tom, even now, can’t remember everything about that night. He remembers drinking big beers straight from the bottle and shoveling fish into his mouth, he remembers laughing hysterically at her serial killer jokes. (Because there was, the police were saying, a serial killer in and around Chicago. He was a stabber, and Katherine had some good material about what it might be like to get knifed by a psychopath.)

  He just barely remembers the two of them, arm-in-arm, stumbling their way along the sidewalk, Tom pretending to practice some kind of karate.

  He just barely remembers giggling as he told her about a “business trip” to England he’d been on.

  And did she fall down as they entered his apartment? Onto the pile of mail? Did she also then pretend to swim in it?

  Maybe.

  From the sex, he remembers the weird smirk back on her face, only this time, he swears he saw it on her face while he was right in the middle of coming, as though she were somehow victorious, she’d gotten another one, and had been expecting victory all along. She smoked a cigarette in his bed, then, without getting up. She said she only ever liked to do it lying on her back.

  He passed out, she passed out.

  A few hours later, just before dawn, he woke up, still a little drunk, and could not fall back asleep. All the sugar in whiskey, someone once told him. Something about metabolism.

  He went to the kitchen, drank a glass of water.

  In the living room, he stood and stared at his luggage, still unpacked. The steamer trunk, given to him by Grayspool.

  Then Tom stood at the foot of his bed, naked, helmet on. Stick pointing. Katherine, asleep, flowing into him.

  What he felt was the unbearable, alien sadness of this woman’s history—or maybe her perception of her own history. He could not be sure. He remembered, through her, how it had felt to be on their first date a few months ago, back at Joe’s Stone Crab and Giant Steak Shack, he felt the odd optimism she had about Tom. He saw his own lie. He saw her sympathy for him when he said it. The old engines of emotion used against her. He saw how she liked him. Behind it, a kind of rippling desperation that had gained strength in the last ten years.

  Behind that, he saw at least a hundred disappointing, mediocre men, each with an attendant stain of optimism, too.

  He saw—really disturbing—how perfectly he fit into that list.

  Tom, right now, stands in the terminal, looking down at the same steamer trunk, worried there will be a problem with security. When he first came home, the helmet slipped through unnoticed, but you never know; he’s not sure whether the terrorism alert has gone up in the last two months.

  It’s December. Now. Here.

  He does not want to have to explain to some idiot rent-a-cop what he’s doing with an enormous metal helmet, or why he’s taking it with him to London. Or why, for that matter, he appears to be so upset.

  Tom is going back. It’s December 18, 2010, a week before Christmas, and he’s going back to find out about Eliza.

  Eliza’s gotten herself into some trouble.

  Some very bad trouble.

  He knows she’s not dead; beyond that, he’s not too sure.

  Yes, so that was back in mid-October, that time he’d humped Katherine, slept with her for the second time, actually, but also the first time he’d used the helmet. And really, it wasn’t quite so bad and desolate as that—he did have a mind-blowing orgasm—and you didn’t always happen to point the thing toward deep depression. Tom saw better things as the weeks went by and he started to use the helmet on a regular basis, looking around at people here and there.

  He realized early on that despite the strangeness of experiencing another person and despite the wicked empathy hangover, it was a good feeling, too. It drew you in. It freed you. It opened you up, this knowing people. It stabilized you. It was something good to understand another person, if not for a couple of minutes. He’d never really thought about it before. How there was something inherently good in that. And considering how few inherently good things Tom perceived in the world, he took note.

  For example: once, Tom was up on the roof—he figured out pretty quickly that the range of the helmet was easily a few hundred yards, he could point the stick at people down on the sidewalk and get quick, fleeting jolts, far safer, far less intense—and he found a girl who’d fallen in love.

  So nice when you see that.

  She was a graduate student, the sciences. At that moment, on that day, in that moment, to be her was to be as light as a cloud.

  Tom liked it. He recalled that feeling. She turned the corner and was gone.

  He leaned back, let the stick fall, tried to linger in that good place as it faded, before the hangover would come.

  She’d had a terrible time in high school, but things were better now—he closed his eyes, breathed, tried to remember.

  There it was, that story from a few years back. But you already know it.

  He saw her running.

  Now, though, here, as in the present, in December on the plane, Tom can’t get comfortable, and he knows that there’s no chance he’ll be able to sleep. He’d take Ambien if he had any, but he doesn’t. He supposes it’s a situation in which it’s okay to have a drink or two, even though he’s been trying to limit his intake of alcohol of late. When the attendant comes by with the drink cart, he gets a small bottle of Jim Beam and a can of soda, then leaves both on his tray-table, unopened, and looks down at the clouds.

  The flight is full; Tom’s sitting somewhere near the midpoint of the 747, and he lucked out with a window seat and an empty in front of him, even though there was no time to make special requests, nothing like that. He bought the ticket late last night, on the internet, for about ten times what it would normally cost, but what else could he do? He hadn’t been able to get in touch with Grayspool after the initial call, could find no real contact information for Pangea University. It was either too young, too obscure, or they were trying to hide it.

  There’s a child sitting next to him, a young boy who, based on the size of his headphones, has little interest in interacting with anybody on this flight. His eyes are closed, but the amount of noise seeping out from the giant orbs on each side of the kid’s head suggests that it would be a miracle if he were actually asleep. The woman sitting beside the boy does not seem to be his mother, nor has she been behaving as though she knows the boy at all. She’s re
ading the newspaper.

  When she flips the pages, Tom catches a glimpse of Eliza’s face. It’s the London Times; Eliza is on the front page.

  “Excuse me?” Tom says to the woman. “Could I take that from you? When you’re through?”

  She smiles at him. “You want the front pages?” she asks, then starts removing folded sections for herself. Tom is surprised to hear that she has a southern accent—probably because of the paper, or the flight itself, he was expecting someone English. She’s middle-aged, with curly blond hair, a little stocky. She’s wearing a festive red sweater and Tom again is reminded that the holidays are upon them.

  He thinks back to the tree in his apartment. He is stunned—stunned—that he went out and got a tree for himself. And decorated it. For himself. When he was with Sherry, he had constantly complained about the rituals of Christmas, always sought to point out this or that banality of the tradition, as though everyone hadn’t heard all of the banalities before. As though it weren’t completely boring to be the realist, the one to bring the whole illusion down.

  This year, unlike previous years—he doesn’t know if it’s because he’s alone because the helmet has changed him, because yes, at this point he’s pretty sure that the helmet has changed him—is the first year he’s realized that people celebrate Christmas knowing full well it’s bullshit.