Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

  However, Harold did not have Bluetooth connectivity, or for that matter a CD player, meaning that while in Harold's company, one had three choices: 1. Drive in silence; 2. Listen to the radio; or 3. Listen to Side B of my dad's cassette of Missy Elliott's excellent album So Addictive, which--because it would not eject from the cassette player--I'd already heard hundreds of times in my life.

  And in the end, Harold's imperfect audio system happened to be the last note in the melody of coincidences that changed my life.

  --

  Daisy and I were scanning stations in search of a song by a particular brilliant and underappreciated boy band when we landed upon a news story. "--Indianapolis-based Pickett Engineering, a construction firm employing more than ten thousand people worldwide, today--" I moved my hand toward the scan button, but Daisy pushed it away.

  "This is what I was telling you about!" she said as the radio continued, "--one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the whereabouts of company CEO Russell Pickett. Pickett, who disappeared the night before a police raid on his home related to a fraud and bribery investigation, was last seen at his riverside compound on September eighth. Anyone with information regarding his whereabouts is encouraged to call the Indianapolis Police Department."

  "A hundred thousand dollars," Daisy said. "And you know his kid."

  "Knew," I said. For two summers, after fifth and sixth grades, Davis and I had gone to Sad Camp together, which is what we'd called Camp Spero, this place down in Brown County for kids with dead parents.

  Aside from hanging out together at Sad Camp, Davis and I would also sometimes see each other during the school year, because he lived just down the river from me, but on the opposite bank. Mom and I lived on the side that sometimes flooded. The Picketts lived on the side with the stone-gabled walls that forced the rising water in our direction.

  "He probably wouldn't even remember me."

  "Everyone remembers you, Holmesy," she said.

  "That's not--"

  "It's not a value judgment. I'm not saying you're good or generous or kind or whatever. I'm just saying you're memorable."

  "I haven't seen him in years," I said. But of course you don't forget playdates at a mansion that contains a golf course, a pool with an island, and five waterslides. Davis was the closest thing to a proper celebrity I'd ever encountered.

  "A hundred thousand dollars," Daisy said again. We pulled onto I-465, the beltway that circumscribes Indianapolis. "I'm fixing Skee-Ball machines for eight forty an hour and there's a hundred grand waiting for us."

  "I wouldn't say waiting for us. Anyway, I have to read about the effects of smallpox on indigenous populations tonight, so I can't really solve The Case of the Fugitive Billionaire." I eased Harold up to highway speed. I never drove him faster than the speed limit. I loved him too much.

  "Well, you know him better than I do, so to quote the infallible boys in the world's greatest pop group, 'You're the One,'" which was this super-cheesy song I was way too old to love, but loved nonetheless.

  "I want to disagree with you, but that is such a great song."

  "You're. The. One. 'You're the one that I choose. The one I'll never lose. You're my forever. My stars. My sky. My air. It's you.'"

  We laughed, and I changed the radio station and thought it was over, but then Daisy started reading me an Indianapolis Star story from her phone. "'Russell Pickett, the controversial CEO and founder of Pickett Engineering, wasn't home when a search warrant was served by the Indianapolis police Friday morning, and he hasn't been home since. Pickett's lawyer, Simon Morris, says he has no information about Pickett's whereabouts, and in a press conference today, Detective Dwight Allen said that no activity on Pickett's credit cards or bank accounts has been noted since the evening before the raid.' Blah-blah-blah . . . 'Allen also asserted that aside from a camera at the front gate, there were no surveillance cameras on the property. A copy of a police report obtained by the Star says that Pickett was last seen Thursday evening by his sons, Davis and Noah.' Blah-blah-blah . . . 'estate just north of Thirty-Eighth Street, lots of lawsuits, supports the zoo,' blah-blah-blah . . . 'call the police if you know anything,' blah-blah-blah. Wait, how are there no security cameras? What kind of billionaire doesn't have security cameras?"

  "The kind who doesn't want his shady business recorded," I said. As we drove, I kept turning the story over in my head. I knew some edge of it was jagged, but I couldn't figure out which one, until I snagged a memory of eerie green coyotes with white eyes. "Wait, there was a camera. Not a security one, but Davis and his brother had a motion-capture camera in the woods by the river. It had, like, night vision, and it would snap a picture whenever something walked past--deer or coyotes or whatever."

  "Holmesy," she said. "We have a lead."

  "And because of the camera at the front gate, he couldn't have just driven off," I said. "So either he climbs over his own wall, or else he walks through the woods down to the river and leaves from there, right?"

  "Yes . . ."

  "So he could've tripped that camera. I mean, it's been a few years since I was there; maybe it's gone."

  "And maybe it's not!" Daisy said.

  "Yeah. Maybe it's not."

  "Exit here," she said suddenly, and I did. I knew it was the wrong exit, but I took it anyway, and without Daisy even telling me to, I got in the right lane to drive back into the city, toward my house. Toward Davis's house.

  Daisy took out her phone and raised it to her ear. "Hey, Eric. It's Daisy. Listen, I'm really sorry, but I've got the stomach flu. Could be norovirus."

  ". . ."

  "Yeah, no problem. Sorry again." She hung up, put her phone in her bag, and said, "If you even imply diarrhea, they tell you to stay home because they're so scared of outbreaks. Right, okay, we're doing this. You still got that canoe?"

  THREE

  YEARS BEFORE, Mom and I had sometimes paddled down the White River, past Davis's house to the park behind the art museum. We'd beach the canoe and walk around for a bit, then paddle back home against the lazy current. But I hadn't been down to the water in years. The White River is beautiful in the abstract--blue herons and geese and deer and all that stuff--but the actual water itself smells like human sewage. Actually, it doesn't smell like human sewage; it smells of human sewage, because whenever it rains, the sewers overflow and the collective waste of Central Indiana dumps directly into the river.

  We pulled into my driveway. I got out, walked to the garage door, squatted down, wriggled my fingers under the door, and then lifted it up. I got back into the car and parked, while Daisy kept telling me we were going to be rich.

  The garage door exertion had gotten me sweating a bit, so when I got inside I headed straight for my room and turned on the window AC unit, sat cross-legged on my bed, and let the cold air blow against my back. My room was a cluttered mess, with dirty clothes everywhere and a spill of papers--worksheets, old tests, college pamphlets Mom brought home--that covered my desk and also sort of spread out along the floor. Daisy stood in the doorway. "You got any clothes around here that would fit me?" she asked. "I feel like you shouldn't meet a billionaire in a Chuck E. Cheese uniform, or in a shirt stained pink by your hair, which are my only outfits at the moment."

  Daisy was about my mom's size, so we decided to raid her closet, and as we tried to find the least Momish top and jeans combo available, Daisy talked. She talked a lot. "I've got a theory about uniforms. I think they design them so that you become, like, a nonperson, so that you're not Daisy Ramirez, a Human Being, but instead a thing that brings people pizza and exchanges their tickets for plastic dinosaurs. It's like the uniform is designed to hide me."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Fucking systemic oppression," Daisy mumbled, and then pulled a hideous purple blouse out of the closet. "Your mom dresses like a ninth-grade math teacher."

  "Well, she is a ninth-grade math teacher."

  "That's no excuse."

  "Maybe a dress?" I h
eld up a calf-length black dress with pink paisleys. Just awful.

  "I think I'm gonna roll with the uniform," she said.

  "Yeah."

  I heard Mom drive up, and even though she wouldn't mind us borrowing clothes, I felt a jolt of nervousness. Daisy saw it and took me by the wrist. We snuck out to the backyard before Mom made it inside, and then picked our way through a little bramble of honeysuckle bushes at the edge of the yard.

  It turned out we did still have that canoe, overturned and full of dead spiders. Daisy flipped it over, then wrenched the paddles and two once-orange life jackets from the ivy that had grown over them. She swept out the canoe by hand, tossed the paddles and the life jackets into it, and dragged the canoe toward the riverbank. Daisy was short and didn't look fit, but she was super strong.

  "The White River is so dirty," I said.

  "Holmesy, you're being irrational. Help me with this thing."

  I grabbed the back part of the canoe. "It's like fifty percent urine. And that's the good half."

  "You're the one," she said again, then heaved the canoe over the riverbank into the water. She jumped down the bank onto a little peninsula of mud, wrapped a too-small life vest around her neck, and climbed into the front of the canoe.

  I followed her, settled into the rear seat, and then used the paddle to push us out into the river. It had been a long time since I'd steered a canoe, but the water was low, and the river was so wide I didn't have to do much. Daisy looked back at me and smiled with her mouth closed. Being on the river made me feel little again.

  As kids, Daisy and I had played all up and down the riverbank when the water was low like this. We played a game called "river kids," imagining we lived alone on the river, scavenging for our livelihood and hiding from the adults who wanted to put us in an orphanage. I remembered Daisy throwing daddy longlegs at me because she knew I hated them, and I'd scream and run away, flailing my arms but not actually scared, because back then all emotions felt like play, like I was experimenting with feeling rather than stuck with it. True terror isn't being scared; it's not having a choice in the matter.

  "You know this river is the only reason Indianapolis even exists?" Daisy said. She turned around in the canoe to face me. "So, like, Indiana had just become a state, and they wanted to build a new city for the state capital, so everybody's debating where it should be. The obvious compromise is to put it in the middle. So these dudes are looking at a map of their new state and they notice there is a river right here, smack in the center of the state, and they're like--boom--perfect place for our capital, because it's 1819 or whatever, and you need water to be a real city for shipping and stuff.

  "So they announce, we're gonna build a new city! On a river! And we're gonna be clever and call it Indiana-polis! And it's only after they make the announcement that they notice the White River is, like, six inches deep, and you can't float a kayak down it, let alone a steamship. For a while, Indianapolis was the largest city in the world not on a navigable waterway."

  "How do you even know that?" I asked.

  "My dad's a big history nerd." Right then her phone started ringing. "Holy shit. I just conjured him." She held the phone up to her ear. "Hey, Papa. . . . Um, yeah, of course. . . . No, he won't mind. . . . Cool, yeah, be home at six." She slid her phone back into her pocket and turned around to me, squinting into the sunlight. "He was asking if I could switch shifts to watch Elena because Mom got extra hours, and I didn't have to lie about already not being at work, and now my dad thinks I care about my sister. Holmesy, everything's working out. Our destiny is coming into focus. We are about to live the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else's misfortune."

  I laughed, and my laughter seemed freakishly loud as it echoed across the deserted river. On a half-submerged tree near the river's bank, a softshell turtle noticed us and plopped into the water. The river was lousy with turtles.

  After the first bend in the river, we passed a shallow island made of millions of white pebbles. A blue heron stood perched on an old bleached tire, and when she saw us she spread her wings and flew away, more pterodactyl than bird. The island forced us into a narrow channel on the east side of the river, and we floated underneath sycamore trees leaning out over the water in search of more sunlight.

  Most of the trees were covered in leaves, some streaked with pink in the first hints of autumn. But we passed under one dead tree, leafless but still standing, and I looked up through its branches, which intersected to fracture the cloudless blue sky into all kinds of irregular polygons.

  I still have my dad's phone. I keep it and a charging cord hidden in Harold's trunk next to the spare tire. A ton of the pictures on his phone were of leafless branches dividing up the sky, like the view I had as we floated under that sycamore. I always wondered what he saw in that, in the split-apart sky.

  Anyway, it really was a beautiful day--golden sunshine bearing down on us with just enough heat. I'm not much of an outside cat, so I rarely have occasion to consider the weather, but in Indianapolis we get eight to ten properly beautiful days a year, and this was one of them. I hardly had to paddle at all as the river bent to the west. The water crinkled with sunlight. A pair of wood ducks noticed us and took off, their wings flapping desperately.

  At last, we came to the bit of land that as kids we'd named Pirates Island. It was a real river island, not like the pebble beach we'd paddled past earlier. Pirates Island had thickets of honeysuckle and tall trees with trunks gnarled from the yearly spring floods. Because the river has so much agricultural runoff, there were crops, too: Little tomato and soybean plants sprang up everywhere, well fertilized by all the sewage.

  I steered the canoe onto the algae-soaked beach and we got out to walk around. Something about the river had made Daisy and me quiet, almost unaware of each other, and we wandered in different directions.

  I'd spent part of my eleventh birthday here. Mom had made a treasure map, and after cake at home, Daisy and Mom and I got into the canoe and paddled down to Pirates Island. We dug with spades at the base of a tree and found a little chest full of chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil. Davis had met us down there, with his little brother, Noah. I remembered digging until my spade hit the plastic of the treasure chest, and allowing myself to feel like it was real treasure, even though I knew it wasn't. I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.

  I walked along the whole edge of the island until I found Daisy sitting on an uprooted barkless tree that had beached here as some flood receded. I sat down next to her and looked into the little pool below our feet, where crawfish were darting around. The pool seemed to be shrinking--it had been a drier summer than usual, and hotter.

  "Remember that birthday party you had here?" she asked.

  "Yeah," I said. At the party, Davis had briefly lost this Iron Man action figure he always had with him. He'd had it for so long that all the decals had been rubbed away; it was just a red torso and yellow limbs. He'd really freaked out when he lost it, I remembered, but then my mom found it.

  "You okay, Holmesy?"

  "Yeah."

  "Can you say anything other than yeah?"

  "Yeah," I said, and smiled a little.

  --

  We sat for a while, and then stood up together without speaking and waded through the knee-deep water until we got to the river's edge. Why didn't it bother me to slosh through the filthy water of the White River when hours earlier I'd found it intolerable to hear my stomach rumble? I wish I knew.

  A chain-link fence held in the boulders that formed the floodwall, and I climbed it, then reached down to help Daisy. We crawled up the riverbank and found ourselves in a forest of sycamore and maple trees. In the distance, I could see the manicured lawns of Pickett's golf course, and beyond that the glass-and-steel Pickett mansion, which had been designed by some famous architect.

  We wandered around for a while as I tried to get my bearings, and then I heard Daisy whisper, "Holmesy." I pic
ked my way through the woods toward her. She'd found the night-vision camera, mounted to a tree, about four feet off the ground. It was a black circle, maybe an inch in diameter--the kind of thing you'd never notice in a forest unless you knew to look for it.

  I opened up my phone and connected to the night-vision camera, which wasn't password protected. In seconds, photos started downloading to my phone. I deleted the first two, which the camera had taken of us, and swiped past a dozen more from the past week--deer and coyotes and raccoons and possums, all of them either daytime shots or green silhouettes with bright white eyes.

  "Don't want to alarm you, but there's a golf cart headed in our vague direction," Daisy said quietly. I looked up. The cart was still a ways away. I swiped through more pictures until I got back to September 9th, and there, yes, in shades of green I could see the back of a stocky man wearing a striped nightshirt. Time stamp 1:01:03 A.M. I screenshotted it.

  "Dude's definitely spotted us," Daisy said nervously.

  I glanced up again and mumbled, "I'm hurrying." I'd swiped to see the previous picture, but it was taking forever to load. I heard Daisy run off, but I stayed, waiting for the photograph. It was odd, for me to be the calm one while feeling Daisy's nerves jangling. But the things that make other people nervous have never scared me. I'm not afraid of men in golf carts or horror movies or roller coasters. I didn't know precisely what I was afraid of, but it wasn't this. The image revealed itself in slow motion, one line of pixels at a time. Coyote. I glanced up, saw the man in the golf cart seeing me, and I bolted.

  I wove back toward the river, scrambled down the riverbank wall, and found Daisy standing above my overturned canoe, holding a large jagged rock high above her head.

  "What the hell are you doing?" I asked.

  "Whoever that guy is, he definitely saw you," she said, "so I'm making an excuse for you."