Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

  "Well, as you'll recall, it isn't a lizard," I pointed out.

  "Holmesy, someday you're going to win the Nobel Prize for Being Incredibly Pedantic, and I'm going to be so proud of you."

  "Thanks," I said. I pulled up outside of Daisy's apartment complex and parked Harold. "So, if Davis's dad died, he and his brother get nothing? Don't you at least have to pay for your kids to go to college or something?"

  "Dunno," she said, "but it makes me think Davis really would turn his dad in if he knew where he was."

  "Yeah," I said. "Someone has to know. He needed help, right? You can't just disappear."

  "Right, but there's so many possible accomplices. Pickett has, like, thousands of employees. And who knows how many people working on that property. I mean, they have a zoologist."

  "It would sort of suck, having all those people around your house all day. Like, people who aren't in your family just, like, constantly in your space."

  "Indeed, Holmesy, however does one bear the pain of overenthusiastic servants?" I laughed, and Daisy clapped her hands and said, "Okay. My to-do list: Research wills. Get police report. Your to-do list: Fall for Davis, which you've already mostly done. Thanks for the ride; time to go pretend I love my sister." She grabbed her backpack, climbed out of Harold, and slammed his precious, fragile door behind her.

  --

  When I got home, I watched TV with Mom, but I couldn't stop thinking about Davis looking down at my finger, holding my hand in his.

  I have these thoughts that Dr. Karen Singh calls "intrusives," but the first time she said it, I heard "invasives," which I like better, because, like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they spread out of control.

  Supposedly everyone has them--you look out from over a bridge or whatever and it occurs to you out of nowhere that you could just jump. And then if you're most people, you think, Well, that was a weird thought, and move on with your life. But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all the other thoughts until it's the only one you're able to have, the thought you're perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself from.

  You're watching TV with your mom--this show about time-traveling crime solvers--and you remember a boy holding your hand, looking at your finger, and then a thought occurs to you: You should unwrap that Band-Aid and check to see if there is an infection.

  You don't actually want to do this; it's just an invasive. Everyone has them. But you can't shut yours up. Since you've had a reasonable amount of cognitive behavioral therapy, you tell yourself, I am not my thoughts, even though deep down you're not sure what exactly that makes you. Then you tell yourself to click a little x in the top corner of the thought to make it go away. And maybe it does for a moment; you're back in your house, on the couch, next to your mom, and then your brain says, Well, but wait. What if your finger is infected? Why not just check? The cafeteria wasn't exactly the most sanitary place to reopen that wound. And then you were in the river.

  Now you're nervous, because you've previously attended this exact rodeo on thousands of occasions, and also because you want to choose the thoughts that are called yours. The river was filthy, after all. Had you gotten some river water on your hand? It wouldn't take much. Time to unwrap the Band-Aid. You tell yourself that you were careful not to touch the water, but your self replies, But what if you touched something that touched the water, and then you tell yourself that this wound is almost certainly not infected, but the distance you've created with the almost gets filled by the thought, You need to check for infection; just check it so we can calm down, and then fine, okay, you excuse yourself to the bathroom and slip off the Band-Aid to discover that there isn't blood, but there might be a bit of moisture on the bandage pad. You hold the Band-Aid up to the yellow light in the bathroom, and yes, that definitely looks like moisture.

  Could be sweat, of course, but also might be water from the river, or worse still seropurulent drainage, a sure sign of infection, so you find the hand sanitizer in the medicine cabinet and squeeze some onto your fingertip, which burns like hell, and then you wash your hands thoroughly, singing your ABCs while you do to make sure you've scrubbed for the full twenty seconds recommended by the Centers for Disease Control, and then you carefully dry your hands with a towel. And then you dig your thumbnail all the way into the crack in the callus until it starts bleeding, and you squeeze the blood out for as long as it comes, and then you blot the wound dry with a tissue. You take a Band-Aid from inside your jeans pocket, where there is never a shortage of them, and you carefully reapply the bandage. You return to the couch to watch TV, and for a few or many minutes, you feel the shivering jolt of the tension easing, the relief of giving in to the lesser angels of your nature.

  And then two or five or six hundred minutes pass before you start to wonder, Wait, did I get all the pus out? Was there pus even or was that only sweat? If it was pus, you might need to drain the wound again.

  The spiral tightens, like that, forever.

  SIX

  AFTER SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY, I joined the swarm of people filing out through the overstuffed hallways of WRHS and made my way to Harold. I had to change the Band-Aid, which took a few minutes, but I preferred to let the traffic thin out a bit before driving home anyway. To kill time, I texted Daisy, asking her to meet me at Applebee's, our go-to restaurant for studying together.

  She responded a few minutes later: I have work until 8. Meet you after?

  Me: Do you need a ride?

  Her: Dad picked me up. He's taking me. Has Davis texted?

  Me: No, should I text him?

  Her: ABSOLUTELY NOT.

  Her: Wait between 24 and 30 hours. Obviously. You're intrigued but not obsessed.

  Me: Got it. I didn't know there were Texting Commandments.

  Her: Well there are. We're almost there so I gotta go. First order of business, drawing straws to see who has to get in the Chuckie costume. Pray for me.

  Harold and I started our drive home, but then it occurred to me that I could go anywhere. Not anywhere, I guess, but nearly. I could drive to Ohio, if I wanted, or Kentucky, and still be home before curfew. Thanks to Harold, a couple hundred square miles of the American Midwest were mine for the taking. So instead of turning to go home, I kept driving north up Meridian Street until I merged onto I-465. I turned the radio up as a song I liked called "Can't Stop Thinking About You" came on, the bass sizzling in Harold's long-blown speakers, the lyrics stupid and silly and everything I needed.

  Sometimes you happen across a brilliant run of radio songs, where each time one station goes to commercial, you scan to another that has just started to play a song you love but had almost forgotten about, a song you never would've picked but that turns out to be perfect for shouting along to. And so I drove along to one of those miraculous playlists, headed nowhere. I followed the highway east, and then south, then west, then north, and then east again, until I ended up at the same Meridian Street exit where I'd started.

  The journey around Indianapolis cost about seven dollars in gas, and I knew it was wasteful, but I felt so much better after circling the city.

  When I parked in the driveway to open up the garage door, I saw I had a series of texts from Daisy:

  I just drew the short straw so I have to get inside the fricking Chuckie costume.

  See you later if I survive.

  If I die weep at my grave every day until a seedling appears in the dirt, then cry on it to make it grow until it becomes a beautiful tree whose roots surround my body.

  They're making me go now they're taking away my phone REMEMBER ME HOLMESY.

  Update: I survived. Getting a ride to Applebee's after work. See you.

  --

  In the living room, Mom was grading quizzes with her feet up on the coffee table. I sat down next to her, and without looking up, she said, "A Lyle from the Pickett estate brought over our canoe today, repaired. Said you and Daisy were paddling down the White
River and hit a rock."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "You and Daisy," she said. "Paddling on the White River."

  "Yeah," I said.

  She looked up at last. "Seems like something you would only do if, say, you wanted to run into Davis Pickett."

  I shrugged.

  "Did it work?" she asked.

  I shrugged again, but she kept looking at me until I gave in and spoke. "I was just thinking about him. Wanted an excuse to check on him, I guess."

  "How is he doing, without his father?"

  "I think he's okay," I said. "Most people don't seem to like their dads much."

  She leaned into me, her shoulder against mine. I knew we were both thinking about my dad, but we had never been good at talking about him. "I wonder if you would have clashed with your father."

  I didn't say anything.

  "He would've understood you, that's for sure. He got your whys in a way I never could. But he was such a worrier, and you might have found that exhausting. I know I did, sometimes."

  "You worry, too," I said.

  "I suppose. Mostly about you."

  "I don't mind worriers," I said. "Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome."

  "You sound just like him." She smiled a little. "I still can't believe he left us." She said it like it was a decision, like he'd been mowing the lawn that day and thought, I think I'll fall down dead now.

  --

  I cooked dinner that night, a macaroni scramble with canned vegetables, boxed macaroni, and some proper cheddar cheese, and then we ate while watching a reality show about regular people trying to survive in the wild. My phone finally buzzed while Mom and I were doing the dishes--Daisy telling me she'd arrived at Applebee's--so I told Mom I'd be back by midnight and reunited with Harold, who was, as always, a pure delight.

  Applebee's is a chain of mid-quality restaurants serving "American food," which essentially means that Everything Features Cheese. Last year, some kid had showed up on our doorstep and talked my mom into buying a huge coupon book to support his Boy Scout troop or something, and the book turned out to include sixty Applebee's coupons offering "Two burgers for $11." Daisy and I had been working our way through them ever since.

  She was waiting for me at a booth, changed out of her work shirt and into a scoop-neck turquoise top, staring into the depths of her phone. Daisy didn't have a computer, so she did everything on her phone, from texting to writing fan fiction. She could type on it faster than I could on a regular keyboard.

  "Have you ever gotten a dick pic?" she asked in lieu of saying hello.

  "Um, I've seen one," I said, scooting into the bench across from her.

  "Well, of course you've see one, Holmesy. Christ, I'm not asking if you're a seventeenth-century nun. I mean have you ever received an unsolicited, no-context dick pic. Like, a dick pic as a form of introduction."

  "Not really," I said.

  "Look at this," she said, and handed me her phone.

  "Yeah, that's a penis," I said, squinting and turning it slightly counterclockwise.

  "Right, but can we talk about it for a minute?"

  "Can we please not?" I dropped the phone as Holly, our server, appeared at the table. Holly was our server quite regularly, and she wasn't exactly a card-carrying member of the Daisy and Holmesy fan club, possibly on account of our coupon-driven Applebee's strategy and limited resources for tipping.

  Daisy spoke up, as she always did. "Holly, have you ever received--"

  "Nope," I said. "No no no." I looked up at Holly. "I'd just like a water with no food please, but around nine forty-five I'll take a veggie burger, no mayonnaise no condiments at all, just a veggie burger and bun in a to-go box please. With fries."

  "And you'll have the Blazin' Texan burger?" Holly asked Daisy.

  "With a glass of red wine, please."

  Holly just stared at her.

  "Fine. Water."

  "I assume y'all have a coupon?" Holly asked.

  "As it happens, we do," I said, and slid it across the table to her.

  Holly had hardly turned away when Daisy started back up. "I mean, how am I supposed to react to a semi-erect penis as fan mail? Am I supposed to feel intrigued?"

  "He probably thinks it'll end in marriage. You'll meet IRL and fall in love and someday tell your kids that it all started with a picture of a disembodied penis."

  "It's just such an odd response to my fiction. Like, okay, follow the thread of thoughts with me: 'I really enjoyed this story about Rey and Chewbacca's romantic adventure scavenging a wrecked Tulgah spaceship on Endor in search of the famed Tulgah patience potion; as a thank-you, I believe I will send the author of that story a photograph of my dick.' How do you get from A to B, Holmesy?"

  "Boys are gross," I said. "Everyone is gross. People and their gross bodies; it all makes me want to barf."

  "Probably just some loser Kylo stan," she mumbled. I had no understanding of her fanfiction language.

  "Please can we talk about something else."

  "Fine. During my break at work, I became an expert in wills. So, get this: You can't actually leave any money to a nonhuman animal when you die, but you can leave all your money to a corporation that exists solely to benefit a nonhuman animal. Basically, the state of Indiana doesn't consider pets people, but it does consider corporations people. So Pickett's money would all go to a company that benefits the tuatara. And it turns out you don't have to leave your kids anything when you die. No matter how rich you are--not a house, not college money, nothing."

  "What happens if their dad goes to prison?"

  "They'd get a guardian. Maybe the house manager or a family member or something, and that person would get money to pay the kids' expenses. If finding fugitives doesn't work out for me as a career, I might get into guardianship of billionaire children.

  "Okay, you start putting together background files on the case and the Pickett family. I'm gonna get the police report and also do my calc homework, because there are only so many hours in a day and I have to spend too many of them at Chuck E. Cheese."

  "How are you going to get a copy of the police report, anyway?"

  "Oh, you know. Wiles," she said.

  --

  I happened to be friends with Davis Pickett on Facebook, and while his profile was a long-abandoned ghost town, it did provide me with one of his usernames--dallgoodman, which led to an Instagram.

  The Instagram contained no real pictures, only quotes rendered in typewritery fonts with soft-focused, crumpled-paper backgrounds. The first one, posted two years ago, was from Charlotte Bronte. "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

  The most recent quote was, "He who doesn't fear death dies only once," which I thought was maybe some veiled reference to his father, but I couldn't unpack it. (For the record, he who does fear death also dies only once, but whatever.)

  Scrolling through the quotes, I noticed a few users who consistently liked Davis's posts, including one, anniebellcheers, whose feed was mostly cheerleading pictures until I scrolled back more than a year and found a series of pictures of her with Davis, featuring a lot of heart emojis.

  Their relationship seemed to have started the summer between ninth and tenth grades and lasted a few months. Her Instagram profile had a link to her Twitter, where she was still following a user named nkogneato, which turned out to be Davis's Twitter handle--I knew because he'd posted a picture of his brother doing a cannonball into their pool.

  The nkogneato username led me to a YouTube profile--the user seemed to like mostly basketball highlights and those really long videos where you watch someone play a video game--and then eventually, after scrolling through many pages of search results, to a blog.

  At first, I couldn't tell for sure if the blog was Davis's. Each post began with a quote and then featured a short little paragraph that was never quite autobiographical enough to place him, like this one:

  "A
t some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough."

  --TONI MORRISON

  Last night I lay on the frozen ground, staring up at a clear sky only somewhat ruined by light pollution and the fog produced by my own breath--no telescope or anything, just me and the wide-open sky--and I kept thinking about how sky is a singular noun, as if it's one thing. But the sky isn't one thing. The sky is everything. And last night, it was enough.

  I didn't know for sure that it was him until I started to notice that many of the quotes from his Instagram feed were also used in the blog, including the Charlotte Bronte one:

  "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

  -- CHARLOTTE BRONTE

  At the end, when walking was work, we sat on a bench looking down at the river, which was running low, and she told me that beauty was mostly a matter of attention. "The river is beautiful because you are looking at it," she said.

  Another, written the previous November, around the time he and anniebellcheers stopped replying to each other on Twitter:

  "By convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color, but in reality atoms and void."

  --DEMOCRITUS

  When observation fails to align with a truth, what do you trust--your senses or your truth? The Greeks didn't even have a word for blue. The color didn't exist to them. Couldn't see it without a word for it.