Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  Every mission requires focus. Anything that is not mission critical needs to be set aside. Ben is not mission critical. Hannah is.

  He stares at me. “If you need more space, okay. Take it, as much as you want. But breaking up with me isn’t going to make her better.”

  “But it will make me better!” I’m shaking now, and this day has to end, it has to. I see Drew, his palm pressed flat against that glass window, watching my sister come back to life. “I think about you … about losing you, and then I make mistakes with my sister because I’m worrying about the what-ifs. And every time I’m with you, I can’t help thinking about it. There are so many ways to die, Ben.”

  “Yes. But there are so many ways to live. Together. For as long as we have.”

  “You don’t get it! We don’t have time. And River, her telling me to live in the present, just accept whatever is going to happen. Screw that. All that got her was a dead brother. But she’s right about one thing: I need to let go. To not be so attached. So that’s what I’m doing, Ben. I’m too … I’m clinging to you, clinging, and I—”

  “Mae. That’s not what she’s saying, not what that means. She’s talking about unhealthy clinging, like with Hannah. Fixing her is becoming your own addiction. And you know how addiction plays out. That’s what she’s talking about.”

  I pull my jacket around me tighter. “I’m sorry.”

  “Mae.” His voice, gravel and crashing rocks, tunneling to Earth’s core. “I’m not him.”

  “What?”

  “Your dad. Is that what this is really about?” He steps closer. “I know what he did freaks you the hell out. But I’m not him. I love you.”

  I wish this were just about being afraid to be cheated on.

  I see Drew, his face ravaged as he leaves Nah’s room. And I see my sister in that room. In that hospital bed.

  I don’t know what to say. So I don’t say anything at all.

  Ben grips the back of one of the chairs. “You’ve never said it back.”

  “If you perform an experiment,” I say, “and every time you do it, no matter the variables, you get the same results, what can you conclude?”

  He blinks. “That your hypothesis is either correct or incorrect.”

  “Every person I say those words to dies, Ben. That’s the result of my experiment.” And then I tell him what I was telling myself in the elevator on the way down to the lobby. “You told me I wasn’t being healthy—with the way I’m handling things with my sister. And you’re right. Just not in the way you think.” I swallow. “Before I met you, I trusted myself. I knew how to work problems and solve them. I could maintain focus. And knowing you has put me in this uncontrolled spin, and I have to recover, Ben. I have to.”

  Because I’m not afraid of heights. I’m afraid of falling.

  I move toward the door. Out of his orbit.

  “Before you met me,” he says, “you had two parents. Your sister was sober. You hadn’t been forced to move across the country and take care of that sister all by yourself.” He crosses to me. “If you’re spinning, Mae, and I agree that you are—it’s not because of me. If you really want to end this, that’s your choice. I’ll accept it. But don’t make me the fall guy.”

  I memorize his face in the moonlight that streams in through the window. The faint trace of freckles beneath his eyes, the thick brows, those long, dark lashes, the bleached tangerine hair. I know I will forget these details, just like I can’t remember if Mom’s teeth were straight or if Dad’s lips were thin.

  Everything, everyone, becomes a watercolor left out in the rain.

  “You are like him. In the good ways,” I say.

  I could drink a case of you. Mom’s Joni Mitchell song about Dad. Italian wedding.

  It was grief soup—that last pot of soup Mom made. Dad’s favorite, and he didn’t get a bite.

  I stand on my tiptoes and kiss Ben’s cheek. Then I turn toward the elevators to take me back up to my sister.

  I’m saving him. He doesn’t know it yet, but I’m saving Ben’s life.

  And my own.

  But then a cool, Pacific Ocean voice says, Do you really think that?

  I don’t know, Mom. I don’t know.

  Mad Matter Magazine Vol. 4, No. 12

  Mad Matter: So, here’s the million-dollar question: If we can’t see dark matter, how do we even know it exists?

  Dr. Winters: Well, mostly due to the gravitational effect dark matter has on distant galaxies. There has to be something creating these gravitational effects. For example, in Chile they discovered that the outermost stars in the Cosmic Seagull galaxy—which is 11.3 billion light-years away—race far too fast to be propelled by just the gravity of the galaxy’s gas and stars. Some invisible matter is interacting with gravitational force, giving them a push and keeping these galaxies from flying apart. Dark matter, bullying stars around. This is just one example.

  We see that there’s this energy moving things—we see the effect of the energy—but not the energy itself. We don’t know what it’s made of, what it looks like. Or what it does beyond affect matter around it gravitationally. And yet most of the universe is made up of it. It’s as ineffable as, well, the idea of God. Except we don’t have actual proof of God. We do, however, have proof that dark matter exists. We just don’t know enough about it yet.

  Mad Matter: The way many physicists and cosmologists talk about dark matter verges on the religious. Substitute God for dark matter, and you could be a priest.

  Dr. Winters: I’ve always felt scientists and the faithful have more in common than we’ve ever given ourselves a chance to see. At the end of the day, we’re asking many of the same questions. I once traveled to India for an astrophysics conference and encountered scores of people on spiritual quests—yogis, meditators, all sorts. I felt like we were cotravelers on the same journey. We just had different guidebooks. They had the Bhagavad Gita, and I had A Brief History of Time. Not all scientists would agree with me on this one. [Laughs] I suppose I’m a misfit of sorts. All my favorite thinkers are.

  Mad Matter: So how do you intend to get to the bottom of this mystery?

  Dr. Winters: What we’re doing is searching for interactions of particles on the subatomic level. Tiny, tiny little buggers. This will help us understand the fundamental structure of the universe. For anything we theorize in modern physics to make a damn bit of sense—how gravity behaves, for example—we can’t move forward until we understand how these subatomic particles—these tiny buggers—interact with each other.

  Mad Matter: And you do this by …

  Dr. Winters: Smashing them. Forcing them to interact. Putting them together and saying, “Okay, now what? Now what are you gonna do when you can’t get away from each other?” Only when they’re together can we see what’s possible.

  c’est la goddamn vie.

  Deli Counter

  Zaftigs

  Brookline, MA

  37

  Hannah

  My sponsor looks like she just walked out of a dark alley after kicking some serious ass. Leather jacket, long red hair, thick black eyeliner.

  “I’m Jo.” She holds out her hand. “And no, I’m not related to Jessica Chastain, but thanks for the compliment.”

  She does look a lot like her.

  “Hannah. Not related to … any famous person.”

  Jo laughs, a bark more than a laugh. I like it. “Glad we’ve established that. Let’s get the fuck out of here. I hate hospitals. What do you say?”

  I smile, despite my earlier decision to hate whoever my sponsor is. “Yeah, okay.”

  Getting a sponsor was my choice. It’s not as common for people my age to have one, but the group therapy thing just isn’t cutting it. And when I want to use or when I just need to talk this shit out, I need someone I can call who understands what I’m going through. Mae tries. Nate tries. But they don’t get it. I need someone who gets it. Not a therapist or a doctor, someone I pay to listen to me bitch who looks at the clo
ck when we have five minutes left. I need to see someone in front of me who is surviving this. I need proof that I can, too—actual evidence. I’m starting to sound like Mae.

  I have been at McLean Hospital for the past ten days. It went like this: an extra day in the hospital on suicide watch (even though they didn’t say that’s what it was), three days of detox again, then straight to McLean for ten days. This is where girls who like pills and tried to kill themselves go. The brochure said McLean is for people with acute psychiatric problems. Is trying to kill yourself an acute psychiatric problem, or just a rational response to the chaos of the universe? I channeled Mae when I asked the psychiatrist that. She smiled and wrote a prescription for Zoloft. I now take many pills each day so that I don’t take pills. Zoloft for Sad. Suboxone to get off opiates. Sleeping pills I don’t remember the name for. Something else for anxiety. Drew really should consider becoming a pharmaceutical suit. He’d make buckets of cash, way more than dealing. But I don’t want to think about Drew because I crave him almost as much as the pills.

  “You hungry?” Jo asks as we step into the elevator.

  I shrug.

  “Yeah, I get it. Depression’s a bitch,” she says. “The key is to find a few things worth living for. I found one, and it’s near your place. You a Zaftigs fan?”

  The Jewish deli near Aunt Nora and Uncle Tony’s was one of Dad’s obsessions.

  “Good bagel chips,” I say.

  “Worth living for,” she says. “Let’s do it.”

  We go to the parking lot and she gestures to a red VW Golf that’s seen better days. There’s one of those COEXIST bumper stickers on it, with all the different religious symbols of the world forming the letters, and an illustrated sticker of the Golden Girls with the words STAY GOLDEN underneath.

  “Life goals,” she says when she sees me notice the girls.

  I can’t imagine being old. Or happy. They’re always smiling, those Golden Girls. About what?

  We get in the car, and she starts it up. The Seu Jorge rendition of “Starman” floats out of the speakers—Bowie in Portuguese. I think my dead father is stalking me.

  We are still not on speaking terms, I say to him.

  Jo’s car smells like cigarettes, but she doesn’t light up.

  “So, Hannah, your life totally sucks right now. I’ve got news for you: Your life is always going to suck a little.” She backs out of the parking spot and whips out of the garage. “So if anyone feeds you some bullshit story about sobriety in which the sun is always shining, don’t listen to them, because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “My parents died in that tsunami,” I say. “And I had an abortion. And my boyfriend cheated on me. And I had to move here from LA, and I fucking hate Boston, no offense. And I don’t think I’m going to graduate. And I just broke up with a boy I think I really love. Oh, and I tried to kill myself. This all happened in the past nine months. I’ve accepted my life is always going to suck.”

  “A little,” she says. “It doesn’t have to suck a lot. When it’s a lot, that’s when we’ve got trouble.” She stops at a red, glances at me. “But: Damn, girl.”

  My mouth twitches. “It’s been a bad year.”

  When we get to Zaftigs, we slide into one of the leather booths, next to a zany painting of a corpulent woman. I love the art here. It’s colorful and weird, like getting to walk around in the brain of a Venice boardwalk artist as they dream. Since it’s the holidays, there are Hanukkah decorations and generic American holiday fare: pretty ornaments dangling from the ceiling, bits of holly.

  I run my hand over a snazzy dreidel propped up against the salt-shaker. “They tried to bring holiday cheer to rehab, but it was sad. Like, mini Christmas trees next to the Suboxone dispensary doesn’t help.”

  Jo snorts. “Aw, man. At least you got out before the big day.” Four more days until Christmas. “I once spent New Year’s in rehab. Fucking sucked. They gave us Martinelli’s, and one of the alcoholics cried.”

  “Lame.”

  “How’d it feel, being in there? Being sober?”

  I spin the dreidel, thinking. “I knew my mom wanted me there. That she wants me to see things from a different perspective. I tried to do that for her.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “That I almost erased one of the last traces of her on Earth.”

  “So you want to get sober for her?”

  I can see where this is going.

  “I know I have to get sober for me. But she’s my talisman, you know?” I run a finger over her evil eye, which might have saved my life. I mean, Mae and Drew and Nate saved my life, but still. I like to think Mom had a part in it.

  “Okay. We can work with that.”

  Once we’ve got coffee and bagel chips and bowls of matzo ball soup, Jo takes a couple bites, then leans forward. “Ask me anything.”

  “What is this, exactly? Me and you.”

  Jo was matched with me through NA, some Narcotics Anonymous version of Tinder, where they put the newly sober with the not-so-newly sober in the hopes that the newly sober don’t fuck up again. The hospital figured it all out for me, gave me some options. I liked Jo’s hair and the fact she said fuck in the email she wrote me, so I chose her.

  “Well, as your sponsor, I’m basically just here for you, man. Any time you think you might use, you call me,” she says. “Or text, whatever. Modern world! Any time you need someone to talk to, or have questions, or need help working the Steps—I’m your girl.”

  The Steps. Right.

  Whenever I detox, they’re all about the whole Twelve-Step Program thing. Work the Steps, they say.

  Step one, I’ve got: I admitted I was powerless against the pills—it’s why I did what I did at the angel statue. Obviously that’s not how you’re supposed to work the Steps.

  “What step would you say you’re on?” she asks me. She slurps her soup, then gives a satisfied smack of her lips.

  “Two,” I say.

  “‘We believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity,’” Jo says, quoting the pamphlet. “You agree with that?”

  My mouth is full of soup, so it gives me an excuse to think. The soup’s good. Mom never tried making matzo ball.

  “I believe in a power greater than myself,” I say. “Whatever She is.”

  If Dad had a grave, he’d be rolling in it. I don’t know what that power is, but it’s real. It’s whatever allowed Pappoús to visit Yia-yia after he was already dead, their song—an old Greek love ballad—playing from an unplugged radio while they danced. I was there when it happened one night. I heard the music, even if I couldn’t see him. Heard my grandmother laugh like a teenage girl when he said something funny.

  “But the whole thing about the power restoring your sanity?” I dip a bagel chip in my soup. “I don’t know about that.”

  “This is how you win step two: You eliminate anything and anyone in your life that fucks with your serenity. You feel me?”

  I frown. “Yeah, I tried that. I fuck with my serenity. But eliminating myself is, I guess, not an option.”

  “Not an option,” she agrees. “You have any friends who used who’ve died?”

  I shake my head.

  “You live in this world long enough, you will. I’ve lost a lot of friends. Sometimes they die on purpose, sometimes not. Either way, we use because we’re not dealing with our shit. And at the bottom of our pile of shit, the foundation of our pile of shit, is the shit lie we tell ourselves: that we are shit. Sound familiar?”

  I nod.

  “You and me, we’re gonna figure out how to make you not feel like a pile of shit. Because I bet that’s when you throw back those pills. It’s certainly why I did.” She pulls up the sleeves of her shirt. She’s covered in old-school-looking sailor tats—anchors and ships and mermaids—but if you look closely …

  “Track marks,” Jo says. “That’s what the pills will lead to. They almost always do. Heroin’s cheaper, easi
er to get, and the high hits you quicker. Same drug as your pills.”

  I never thought about myself that way—as the kind of girl who would stick a needle in her arm. But if someone had come into my room during detox with a syringe, I wouldn’t have said no. They made me detox again, after the angel, and it was just as bad as the other two times. Third time is not a fucking charm.

  I’m so tired.

  “I don’t think…” I swallow. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  Jo pulls down her sleeves. “How many days sober are you?”

  “Ten.”

  She holds up her hand. Black nail polish. Chipped. (I like her.)

  “Count your fingers, Blue.”

  “What?”

  “You like Janis Joplin?”

  I shrug.

  Jo pulls out her phone. Scrolls through it. Then she hands me her earbuds.

  “Put these on. Close your eyes.”

  “Here?”

  The look she gives me reminds me of Mom’s Kali statue.

  “Girl, you rode the dragon in the middle of the Boston Public Garden. Are you really getting bashful on me now?”

  I put the earbuds in. Close my eyes.

  Soft electric guitar. Then, Janis’s whiskey-smoke voice, singing to a sad girl she calls Blue who’s at the end of her rope.

  Sit there, count your fingers. What else, what else is there to do?

  The words, the song, it’s a lullaby. Like Mom came from wherever she is and somehow she’s sitting in this booth in Zaftigs and she’s holding me in her arms and she’s saying: I see you.

  When the song ends, I open my eyes. Jo is a blur, a teary mess of wavy auburn hair and leather jacket and thick eyeliner. She reaches across the table and takes out the earbuds. Hands me a napkin.