Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

We are part of the school of fish, the bodies flowing out of Kendall station and up into the cold October night air.

  “You didn’t have to come get me, you know,” I say as we reach the sidewalk. I have been possessed by a grouchy old lady. “I could have just met you here.”

  “I was in your area.”

  “No, you weren’t. It took you an hour to come to my house, pick me up, and bring me all the way back here.” I stare him down. “This isn’t a date.”

  “Okay.” But he smiles.

  I hate how all the particles in me rearrange themselves when he does that. I pull my hand out of his and slide on my gloves and shove a hat on and stomp ahead until Ben calls, “You’re going the wrong way.”

  Right. I am in entirely new territory. His territory.

  Ben keeps smiling as we pass Lafayette Square. He gestures toward a nightclub and restaurant on the left.

  “We usually get dinner at the Middle East after. You’ll like it. We could go to a show there sometime, if you want.”

  “A show?”

  “Like, a concert.”

  “Oh.” I’ve never been to a concert before. That’s Hannah’s thing. I glance at the marquee. “Who are the Dresden Dolls?”

  “Only my favorite band. And I might just have an extra ticket.” He glances at me. “Nate’s coming. I promise I’ll only try to kiss you three times. Four if I’m feeling especially bold.”

  “You are—” I throw up my hands. “I actually have no words.”

  “Just yes will suffice.” He stops. “We’re here, by the way.”

  Ben steps inside the doors of the yoga studio his group uses on Friday nights, and I don’t have a choice but to follow him in. It’s cold outside. And, despite the fact that Ben talks about death like it’s the weather, I want to sit beside him and breathe his air.

  But the last yoga studio I was in was my mom’s.

  I stand on the sidewalk for a minute, lost in a spacetime bubble.

  “Mom, I can’t twist like that!”

  She laughs. “Mae, honey, just put your head—no, put it under your arm. Yes, like that.”

  I glare at her. “This is harder than advanced calculus.”

  “How are you going to get around a space station without bending, hm?”

  “I’m going to float through it. Obviously.”

  I give up on the pose and lie on my back. Corpse pose. I point to myself.

  “You’re killing me.”

  Mom laughs, then lies next to me, the tips of our fingers touching. We stare at the ceiling, which I helped her paint a long time ago to look like the night sky.

  I stargaze with both of my parents, just in different ways.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did Riley give up on me because I’m so … inflexible?”

  An astronaut needs to be disciplined, but not everyone understands that.

  My mother reaches out and brushes back my bangs. The sunlight streams through the window behind her and turns her hair into melted chocolate.

  “Someday, Mae, you will find your person. Or they will find you. And they will love you for the driven, intelligent, shoot-for-the-moon girl you are. You hold out for them. They’re out there. I know it.”

  I smile. “Like you and Dad?”

  She leans forward. Presses her lips to my forehead. “Riley’s not your person. But I bet you’ll always be the one that got away.”

  It’s not until now, standing outside this Boston yoga studio, that I realize: She didn’t answer my question about her and Dad.

  * * *

  Ben sits next to me, and the weight of my body on the meditation cushion and the weight of his body on the cushion next to mine and the distance between us, which isn’t very much, gets me thinking about Newton and how, maybe, attraction is an expression of the universal law of gravitation.

  Everyone who has ever felt something for another person is really just playing out

  F = Gm1m2/r2

  The force (F) due to gravity between two masses (m1(me) and m2(Ben)) which are a distance apart (r)—in this case, I’d say about six inches. G is the gravitational constant, which is 6.67408 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2.

  So the reason I can’t move away when he’s around is simply because of gravity. Just the force of masses.

  Ben’s only a math problem.

  “It’s just physics,” I say.

  He looks at me. “I’ll buy in if you catch me up.”

  “I said that out loud?”

  He nods. Smiles.

  I’ll buy in if you catch me up. No one ever wants to buy in on my thoughts or be caught up except Dad. Mom would try, but her eyes would glaze over as soon as it got too sciencey.

  “Ignore me.” I put my eyes on the front of the room. Looking at Ben makes me wobbly. “I’m just on a mental EVA—an Extravehicular Activity, better known as—”

  “A space walk—I know. I may be a geophysicist, but I’m not totally clueless.” And then he winks. WINKS!

  “Well. That remains to be determined.”

  All around us, people are talking quietly on their cushions, but I’m sure their conversations are more normal. I don’t know how to have normal conversations. I try, but I never get the references. Who has time to watch all those videos and memes? How do people keep up?

  The room is small and warm and smells like cedar. I thought places like this were only for Mom and Hannah. There are seventeen people here. All college-aged, a mix. Most of them have arms covered in tattoos, but some are pretty clean-cut. I am certainly the only person wearing a vintage eighties polka-dot sweater, complete with shoulder pads.

  “So.” Ben scooches closer. “You go on mental space walks?”

  “Yes. Well, that’s what my dad calls it.”

  “So catch me up.”

  F = Gm1m2/r2

  I pretend to adjust my cushion, but really I’m turning six inches into twelve inches. “Usually people just let me go on them. By myself.”

  Hint. Hint.

  He shifts his cushion closer, ignoring all obvious hinting. “But I want to come with. So.”

  He takes my hand. It is warm. Thermodynamics. I’m not great with those equations. Yet. But that’s all it is. Heat is an energetic exchange that’s—

  “Where are we going?” he asks, soft.

  Ben Tamura is relentless. Typical scientist.

  “I’m … I’m working on a theory. That … that…” I pull my hand away. I can’t tell him about gravity because this is NOT a date. “Human interaction can be expressed mathematically. I’ve applied Coulomb’s law to Hannah and I—the results were surprising. And it’s making me wonder if there is an equation for other things, like emotions. Grief. What is the mathematical expression of grief? Can you quantify it? And if so, can you solve it?”

  He looks at his hands, frowning. At first I think he’s disappointed in this particular space walk, but I realize this is Ben’s thinking face, and I like it. I like his face. All of his faces. The whole periodic table that plays out across the valley beneath the ridge of his nose and the planets of his eyes and the craters beneath them, dark circles from late study nights and early mornings at the coffeehouse. I want to be the Neil Armstrong of Planet Ben, plant a flag.

  I AM IN SO MUCH TROUBLE.

  Oxytocin and vasopressin. Attachment chemicals. This is what this is. He is an evil genius, convincing me to come here, to be around him more, and now he’s not just dopey dopamine, which I could have handled, now it will hurt, it will hurt—

  “You could maybe look at an equation for the moment of inertia,” he finally says. “Does grief feel like that? Like not moving?”

  Wow. He … wow.

  But his hypothesis is incorrect.

  Losing and the fear of loss—they feel the same. So fast. Rushing. Rising and cresting until it covers you completely.

  “No,” I say. “It feels like a wave.” I grab my purse. “I have to go.”

  I try to stand, which is difficult when
your foot has fallen asleep, and Ben is looking up at me, stricken. A question forms on his lips, but before he can ask it, before he can ask my question—Why? Why?—and I can give him his favorite words—I don’t know—a bell rings, clear and bright.

  It is the sound the sun would make, if it could make a sound, when it is coming up over the horizon. Hello, Earth. Good morning. Good morning.

  I am half-crouched, uncertain. I can hear my father ringing that bell in his study. It meant he was done meditating, that it was okay to knock on the door, to come in, to be together again.

  Gravity expresses itself in its most familiar way: It pushes me down, back onto the cushion.

  The room quiets, a quiet that thrums with expectation. Readiness. How it feels when Dad is about to lecture, and he looks out over the auditorium. Pushes up his glasses.

  I pull my knees up to my chin. Ben reaches over and—just for a moment—rests his hand on my foot, on my Doctor Who sock, and squeezes. Then he lets go.

  A woman is now at the front of the room, sitting on the cushion. She has the most beautiful Afro I have ever seen, like a star system, and wide-set eyes that know things. I think you only get to sit on that cushion if you know things.

  Like almost everyone here, the woman is covered in tattoos. Her hands, even. When she puts her palms together, the sides read: ONLY LOVE.

  “Hey, everyone. I recognize most of you, but for those of you I haven’t met, my name is River. Yes, that’s my real name, not some shit I made up to sound enlightened.”

  Oh, I like her.

  There is soft laughter, and she smiles. For just a moment, her eyes meet mine, and she gives me a nod.

  “So, here’s the deal. We’re gonna sit. Simple—but not easy.” She shakes her head. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t sit here to relax. To have a little time-out from our lives, do some deep breathing, and call it a night. Nope. You want that, you motherfuckers came to the wrong meditation class.” Now there’s some real laughter. “We are going to sit here with all our shit, with ourselves just as we are, and accept whatever is happening. We are going to just be. Right here, right now. Not in yesterday, thinking about the past. Not in tomorrow, thinking about the future. We are going to be here. Right now. This moment. This breath.

  “You might be bored as fuck. Sit with that. You might be scared at what you see in yourself, what you feel. Sit with that. You MIT nerds among us might figure out the cure for cancer. Sit with that—and don’t write anything down until we’re done sitting.” More laughter. “Why do we do this? It’s Friday night. We could be at a party, could be binge-watching something stupid, could be kicking our roommates out of our rooms so we can study anatomy…” Ben laughs softly, and I do not like what that does to certain regions of me that shall go unnamed for reasons of discretion.

  “We do this,” River says, “so we can wake up from the trance. You know what I mean, right? The trance of thinking that this”—she waves a finger around the room—“is for keeps. It’s not. It’s just a ride. Amanda Palmer said that. And it’s true. It’s just a ride. And we are missing it because we are too lost in all the shit we want to have or do or be. We miss it because we’re too busy updating our social media status and reading another article online and watching another video. And this ride? You only get one ticket—one go. Unless you have really fucking fantastic karma, if you believe in that. Most people, they get on this ride and instead of buckling in and doing this thing, they check out. Buy shit they don’t need. Live on their phone. Not us. Here, we sit so we can rock the shit out of this roller coaster.”

  For just a second, the room dissolves. Explodes, maybe.

  This, I think, is what Ben would call a Dharma Bomb. A truth bomb. I have been living my entire life in the future. The present has always been a means to an end. But what if my end is a wave, too? I’ve been living for a life that might never happen. What did I miss with my parents that I can’t ever get back?

  “All right.” She smiles. “Let’s ride.”

  We close our eyes. She rings the bell.

  Almost immediately, I want to bolt.

  My back hurts. Am I breathing right? Can Ben hear me breathing? Why does Bowie say “ground control to Major Tom” and not “mission control”? Maybe it’s like how in England they say jumper instead of sweater. So in England it’s called ground control. But they’re not controlling the ground, that’s bonkers, they’re trying to control a spaceship in the sky, and they’re obviously not doing a good job of it, because Major Tom is not going to be making it home. Are there even English astronauts? I think there are. Chris Hadfield’s Canadian, and that’s part of the Commonwealth, so I guess technically England is represented, but maybe there are actually British—

  “You’re going to have thoughts,” River says, soft and gentle. “But don’t hold on to them. Let them be like clouds passing across the sky of your mind: Don’t cling to them, let them go. Focus on your breath. When a new thought comes, let that cloud go. Tibetans call this ‘sky mind.’ Thoughts, feelings, images, urges, sensations in the body—all of it is just weather.”

  Okay. Breathe. Breathe.

  I can’t hear Ben breathing. Is he alive? Of course he’s alive. But maybe I should open my eyes and look at him, to check, but then River will see me do it.

  Sky mind. Sky mind. Weather.

  “Just breathe,” River murmurs.

  My back hurts. I can’t believe Dad did this every day. He never said his back—weather. Sky mind. Cloud. Cloud. Hannah breaks the ISS and Mom brushes back my hair, whispers, ‘We are responsible for the things we tame,’ and Dad says, ‘Would you look at the Milky Way tonight!’ I miss him. I MISS HIM. I MISS HER. I MISS. I MISS.

  Oxygen levels low. Very low. Breath is fast and ragged, can everyone hear me? Is the whole room sounding like my breath and they’re all looking at me? No. Paranoia is setting in. Breathe. Sky mind, sky—I MISS I MISS I missed so much of the ride with them, and now they’re gone—am I going to faint? Or cry? Not here. NOT HERE.

  This is a tailspin, that’s what this is, and see, this is what happens when you lose control, when you let your subconscious take over. A bad idea, a HORRIBLE idea, what sick game is Ben playing? Sky mind. Ground control. Ground control. Grip my knees—yes. A coping mechanism is key in life-threatening situations. Hold whatever is building in me at bay. Work the problem. Calm under pressure. An astronaut stays calm under pressure. When is she going to ring the FUCKING BELL because I can’t breathe. Calm. Calm. NO.

  My eyes snap open.

  The room is dark and quiet, a cocoon. Not a jet plummeting from the sky. Everyone’s eyes are closed. River’s, too. Ben’s. A sigh falls out of me. He is so beautiful. Dark crescent moon lashes. Would it be weird if I just laid my head in his lap for the rest of the meditation? Would he be okay with that?

  “You don’t have to do anything,” River says into the dim room. “All you have to do is take this breath. All you have to think about is this breath. That’s it.”

  I close my eyes. I take this breath.

  Then the next one.

  Then the next one.

  For a sliver of that breath, I feel something. I touch … something. It is wide and deep, dark and light. It is quiet here. Still. It is like shrugging off yourself. Like yourself is a too-heavy coat and you don’t have to wear it anymore.

  Silence.

  The bell rings.

  Good morning, Earth.

  My eyes peel open.

  I turn to Ben. When he looks at me, that something, that quiet place, it’s there, in his eyes. He smiles. I smile back.

  “So,” River says, “this is the dharma according to James Baldwin.” She glances at a piece of paper in her hand.

  “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sen
se of quest and daring and growth.”

  She looks out at us. “This is what the ride’s all about, my friends. Why we take it in the first place. Love. You’ve never been on a roller coaster that didn’t require some bravery. Right? Like Baldwin says, we need daring and growth. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re daring brave.” She places her palms together. ONLY LOVE. “Now go out there and don’t be assholes to yourself or anyone else. I’ll see you next week.”

  Everyone laughs—even me. This is certainly not Midnight Mass with Gram.

  “What did it feel like?” Ben asks later—much later.

  We are at the Middle East and our bellies are full and he has pulled me into a corner. It’s so crowded here you can’t even see the floor. The room smells like old beer and good food. I suspect we are the only people drinking smoothies.

  I think about it. “Like … finding zero gravity while on Earth.”

  “The geophysicist version of that is grounded.” He takes my drink out of my hand and sets it on the counter beside us, then takes my hands in his.

  “What are you—”

  “Do you remember that night on the couch, how you told me the universe was once so small we could hold it in the palm of our hands?”

  I nod. “And you … you said…”

  “I am in so much trouble,” he whispers. “Do you know why I said that?”

  I shake my head. Even though I know. This would be so much easier if he didn’t feel like a deep breath, like that bell, ringing: Good morning, Earth.

  “Because, Mae, you hold me. Just like that. You hold me in the palm of your hand.”

  He brings my palm to his lips. I don’t have an equation for turning into starlight.

  It is the seventh time I cry in my life.

  “Oh god,” he says, panicked. “Tell me this is good crying.”

  “I don’t know!”

  Ben smiles. His favorite words.

  I shake my head. “I have felt everything, everything on the human emotional spectrum in the past seven weeks. I can’t … I just—”

  Ben pulls me farther into the corner as a group of people push through the tiny space. Someone turns up the music and turns down the lights. He has to shout over the Arctic Monkeys.