by Erika Swyler
He wound his watch and pictured his brilliant daughter, whom only he found beautiful, heading to the house but never arriving. Moving forward in fractions. Like Zeno’s Achilles and the Tortoise paradox, always approaching, but never reaching.
The television blinked, the picture snapping out. Betheen jumped.
“The station must have cut the feed,” he said. A crisp pop from the basement echoed through the laundry chute, followed by a faint smell of electrical burning. Power surge. Common enough around launches. “Probably a blown fuse. I’ll look.”
He was halfway to the stairs when she said, “Stay a minute? Just until I pack up the cake. I don’t want to be alone.” She didn’t meet his eye, tossing the words to the cabinets as she reached for a cake box. Sunlight and the curtains made her yellow, the same butter color as the kitchen.
He stayed.
“I’m sorry I said that. The clinical thing. It wasn’t fair,” she said.
“It’s true. You didn’t mean it in a bad way.”
“I don’t know what I mean sometimes.”
“What are you working on?” he asked when he saw her jot something on an index card.
“I’m figuring out something kind of like a water cake. That’s a dessert that’s sort of like a jelly but looks like a raindrop,” she said. “So, texture, surface tension, and sugar. Oh, and alcohol. It’s a wedding cake, so champagne.”
“That’s what all the agar is for?” There were bags of the stuff stashed in the cabinets.
“Kanten flakes, yes. Gelatin is too stiff and not clear enough. It has to have movement to it.”
“So you’re making alcoholic Jell-O.”
“It’s not Jell-O. And don’t call it ‘aspic’ or ‘gelée’ either. I’m making a wedding cake and I’m going to take it to the Orlando Cake Show, and I’m going to enter it in the concept cake category and I’m going to win, thank you. They’re small thinkers over there, and they don’t understand what cake can do. Or how boring wedding cakes are. Everyone is used to stiff cakes, bricks with icing on them. They think a concept cake is a cake that looks exactly like someone’s new house. They don’t know what they want—something soft, delicate, intangible, moving. It should change.”
The way marriages did.
The fire started running up his spine, and he had to pull his hand away. Shake it out. “I have to work on lectures. Are you sure you don’t want to help?”
“This is something good; maybe I can change the way people think about something. Bring in a little more business. I don’t want to do your typing anymore, Theo. I can’t.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.” He’d just been thinking of her. Though, perhaps it had been the idea of her clacking away on a typewriter.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She smiled. “Me too.”
Crucible
The ground beneath Easter is new, geologically fragile, and destined to sink back into the sea and the water below it. A century before, men drained and tilled it and carved rows for the orange trees that were more at home in Easter than anywhere else in the world. They set buildings on the new land, and with each change, it stretched to learn its new shape. Houses were made from what the surrounding land offered: pine wood, limestone, and coral stone. The cement walls of Theo Papas’s lab in the sciences building are local sand and local stone and contain fossilized shadows of shells and coral. The shadows echo ocean currents.
Challenger’s brutal ascent births a seismic hum that rattles the foundation of the lab. It moves as though alive and searching for water.
A rumble courses down a ventilator hose, jostling a magnetic track.
A metal strut bows and Theo Papas’s giant spider begins to kneel, kowtowing to the stone and its memory of life.
The launch blankets the machine with waves of sound and motion. From inside the cradle of glass and gold comes a tiny snap. A hint of smoke, sooty and ripe. A spark, perhaps a reflection of sparks—and then this aberrant charge that moves like a ripple is gone, running through an electrical line. There is thickness to it, like a smooth drip of corn syrup, and air and light bend around it as it flows along wire and cable, threading through buildings, houses, and eventually the Easter Municipal Pumping Station, where the lights begin to flicker like a slow blink. Jeff Guthrie notices, and moves to replace the bulb above his desk. As he reaches, a small static shock runs through him, a charge built up from his shoes on the carpet. He feels it, but not the movement below.
Below the coral stone and the thin crust of land on which Easter sits is sweet groundwater that gives the soil its flavor and makes the oranges grow. Easter Municipal pumps it away to keep the town from sinking, into lakes and ponds behind houses, into canals that line the roadways, making Easter almost an island unto itself.
Beneath Easter and Jeff Guthrie’s feet, in the pumps that keep the land drained and dry, water meets spark. In the dark below the ground, in the water, there is no one to see the rippling or its beautiful glow.
1986: Mico Argentatus
The world screamed by, not the jerky fast-forward from movies, but a slick blur of energy. Nedda touched one shoe to the pavement, testing to see if it was right, and a fourth grader smashed into her. The lot was packed with buses and mom cars—wood-panel station wagons that everybody but Betheen drove. Betheen had an old Cadillac, a boat of a car that stuck out as much as she did. A news van was there, and a shiny-haired reporter talked to Principal Lauder.
“Dork.” The word came from a group of girls, loud enough to carry, and was directed at her.
The sky rolled, stretching clouds, spreading the pieces of shuttle, molecules, atoms flying on the wind. They were up there; millions of pieces, scattering across Easter, across Florida, the Atlantic, and falling, tumbling, raining.
A familiar shoulder bumped hers.
“Hey,” Denny said. “Wanna go?”
The funny little flutter between her stomach and ribs quieted.
They fell into step, weaving through the bus lines, crossing the field to the palmetto forest that separated the school from the south part of Easter and the old park. Tall grass gave way to larger moss-dusted oaks, then palmettos and a path that snaked through the trees, worn by decades of deer and people taking the same trail she and Denny did. Nedda loved dense woods. Snakes. Bugs. Woods that were loud and quiet.
She hadn’t spoken since the assembly, not even when Mrs. Wheeler told her to walk home with Denny, and the words were building up. Her ship was gone. Judy Resnik was gone. There was a hole where there hadn’t been one before—inside her and in the world too, though that wasn’t how holes were supposed to work. She hurt. Sally Ride must hurt. She’d lost a ship, her ship, and her friends. They had to have been friends. Nedda knew ship facts, statistics, but she didn’t know something as simple as whether the astronauts were friends. It hadn’t seemed important.
It was important.
“Hey, look. Coffee,” Denny said, dropping to the ground, folding up like a toad. His shaggy black hair mixed with the shadows as he pulled up handfuls of waxy purple berries. Easy. He was so easy. Normal. “I bet we could probably get a gallon out of all this.”
She’d been nine, Denny ten, when she’d read that the shiny plants were wild coffee. She and Denny had planned to collect, dry, and roast the berries to make their own brew. They’d stockpiled berries in his treehouse, but rats and birds made off with most of them before they’d gotten around to drying. Later, she discovered that you couldn’t make real coffee from this kind of berry, but she never told Denny. It was fun to stuff their backpacks and fill his tennis shoes with them, and she liked him with berries spilling out of every pocket. Happy. He’d dyed his toes purple once when he’d forgotten to shake out his shoes. Purple-toed Denny was her favorite Denny. She crouched down beside him and shoved a handful of berries in the front pouch of her book bag. The skins were tight and smooth, full to bursting.
“Did you see it?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She swallowed
around a lump of thoughts. Bolus, that was the word. Landing on the right word unleashed the rest. “OV-099. OV is ‘orbiter vehicle.’ Did you know that’s what Challenger is called? Orbiting is like a controlled fall. OVs fall around Earth.” She squinted her left eye. “NASA used Challenger for everything. First untethered spacewalk, McCandless and Stewart. First American woman in space, Sally Ride. First African American man in space, Guion Bluford. Tons of firsts.” Was. Challenger was. She poked her fingernail through a shiny leaf, then tore it from the stem, shredding it. “First mission with two women. First night launch. First night landing. First shuttle to land at Kennedy. Three Spacelab missions. It’s the workhorse of the fleet. Challenger flies more than Columbia.” Flew. She thought the word again and again until it was meaningless. Then came the names: Scobee, McNair, Smith, Onizuka, Jarvis, McAuliffe, Resnik. Then their faces. There were news clippings tucked in her desk drawer. The thought bolus contained every spec she’d ever read, all of it waiting to be vomited out. Denny didn’t need to hear it. She shredded another leaf. “This mission was going to study Halley’s Comet. They had a satellite on board that was going to look at it in ultraviolet light. It’s gone now. All of it.”
“Do you have the patch?”
She dug through her pocket to hand him the drawing, now soft with worry and sweat.
Gangly described them both, but Denny had the hope of growing out of it. Pop Prater was tall and solid. Denny looked like him, the same hair, the same full-face smile, but Denny’s was better. He’d busted a front tooth falling off the monkey bars, and it left him with a jack-o’-lantern grin—the good kind. His clumsiness made him good too. Pop Prater looked like who he was, the man who ran Prater Citrus. Denny looked like a friend and was enough like a brother that she sometimes forgot he wasn’t. The patch looked at home in his hand.
“This is a good one, really good,” he said. “The colors came out cool. The yellow’s awesome.” He moved to a sunny spot and held it up for a longer look. “Best one yet.”
“Thanks.” The too many words went away, leaving quiet, the woods, and the hole that was inside her and out. He handed the patch back. Denny didn’t care if she talked too much, or not enough. It would be good to stay right there, collecting coffee berries and letting him bump her shoulder. “I don’t feel like going home,” she said.
“Me neither. I failed a math test and I have to get it signed. Mr. Tressa knows I forged my mom’s signature last time.”
They scrambled over a fallen palm, its upended roots like dried noodle cakes. To their left, the shadow of a giant tiki head peered through a break in the trees, the fenced-off entrance to Island Paradise Park and Zoo. Long abandoned, parts of the waterslides had toppled. The tiki-head gate was the last remaining landmark of when Easter had been a destination.
They followed a trail away from the park until the palmettoes thinned out and opened onto Pete McIntyre’s backyard, where they spent more afternoons than not. Mr. Pete had done maintenance at NASA during Apollo and just after, and he’d developed a habit of picking up unwanted parts when buildings and launch complexes shuttered. His yard was a garden of scrap metal, junk, machinery, and the closest thing Easter had to a space museum.
Nedda wanted all of it.
Mr. Pete charged tourists two bucks to look through his house and gawk at things like the plastic bags astronauts went to the bathroom in on the lunar missions. Nedda and Denny got to gawk for free. Mr. Pete fixed cars now, which meant his yard was also a repository for auto parts and a fully intact truck he’d pulled up from Fox Lake with a winch. On summer weekends, she and Denny would climb in the truck after fishing, their catch in a paint bucket, and wait for sun to warm the water until the snappers squirmed, flapping their frowning mouths.
Denny said it was a 1948 Ford. He paid attention to things like that. He climbed into the truck and flopped down in the back. “Are you coming up?”
“In a sec.”
Next to Mr. Pete’s screened-in porch was a beautiful oddity—a launch sequencer. Half asleep and waiting for current, it was infinitely inviting. It was from Launch Complex 36A, Mr. Pete had told her, but she’d already known. Shuttle launches ran by computer now, but missiles and satellites still ran analog. The sequencer looked about seven feet tall, was wide as the freezer case at the diner, and painted dull gray. Each light in the rows of green, white, and red was tied to a specific event, and all those signals connected to a pen-and-needle feed that marked every blip and surge on a roll of paper. The wires at the top were held down on breadboard, the same kind of construction base her dad used when he showed her how to make a circuit. She touched a needle. It slid smoothly to the left, and for some reason that made her want to cry.
“Do you think a missile blew them up?” Denny asked. “How much you want to bet it was Russians? I bet you that’s what it looks like when a missile hits something. I bet it was small too. Russians make all kinds of stuff extra tiny.”
Her face itched where Jimmy La Morte’s spitball had landed. “I don’t know. But they would tell us, right? The news would at least.”
“I guess. Maybe they don’t know yet either.”
He popped up, tongue poking through the space left by his broken tooth. “Do you think they exploded? It was super quick. What’s that gotta feel like? Do you think it was like the microwave? Probably not, right?”
“It wasn’t like the microwave.”
They’d put marshmallows in the microwave at Denny’s house and watched them swell and pop. Denny’s mom caught them half a bag in and screeched about going blind from sitting too close. They’d spent the rest of the day talking about eyeballs exploding and playing Congo Bongo on his ColecoVision. Denny had seen a horror movie where a guy’s eyes popped like balloons and another guy’s head exploded.
“Microwaves heat stuff up by shaking all the molecules inside. That’s how they cook things. The screen on the door stops the waves from getting out, so you can’t cook your eyeballs, no matter what your mom says.” Then, to be clear, she said, “It wasn’t like that.”
“Okay,” he said, and a little later, “Good.”
She shinnied into the truck bed and tossed her bag over the side, as Denny had done. There was something in the bed.
It took a minute to place; she’d never seen one outside a zoo. It was like opening the refrigerator to find you’d put the toothpaste in while half asleep.
“Denny! A green monkey.” When Island Paradise Park and Zoo had closed, animals had escaped or gone missing, mixing with the local wildlife and boa constrictors who’d slipped their owners’ cages. One kind of monkey had been an especially good escape artist—marmosets. They’d gone on to breed in the wild, even thrive. When they’d escaped, they’d been white, but the weather and Easter’s trees tinted them green with algae and moss. They’d turned nasty too. She’d heard they ripped the heads off rabbits, and one had scalped a girl. She feared them as much as she wanted to catch one and keep it. Here one was, sitting in a small puddle, wet, with a dark catlike tail, red-brown eyes too large for its face, like the stones in Aunt June’s clunky bracelet, and pink hands with black claws at the end. Scalp rippers. Speckled with dirt, the monkey blended in with the truck’s rust and mud. “It’s one of the park monkeys. A silvery marmoset.” Mico argentatus. She’d looked it up when she wanted to know why there were green monkeys. It was barely breathing, and didn’t startle when Denny scooted next to her. The truck wobbled but the monkey stayed still.
“Grab him,” Denny whispered. “My mom’s got a parrot cage in the garage we can keep him in.”
“Quiet, you’ll scare him.” She inched forward, hands cupped. “Hey, little guy. Hey, fella.” Not even a twitch. “I think it might be dead.”
“It doesn’t look dead.”
He was right; it looked warm and alive. And she wanted it. Badly. She wanted to walk into school with a scalp-ripping monkey perched on her shoulder. She tapped by its tail. Thp, thp, thp. Its ears were so thin that light came through
, and its face was pink and peach, fine-grained, like baby skin. But its mouth was full of needles, ready to murder rabbits. Why wasn’t it running? It should run, lunge, lash out, or at least blink.
“Get a stick. I want to see if it’s dead.” The image of exploding eyeballs rose again. “I don’t see flies. If it’s dead there should be flies, right? Maybe it’s just sick.”
“I don’t know. There’s flies on poop, but poop’s not dead,” Denny said.
“But poop was never alive either.” Something metal poked her side, leaving a smear of sludge on her jacket. “Hey.”
“Does a dipstick work?”
“Sure.”
When Nedda prodded at the monkey, it almost pushed back against the dipstick. Weird. Another poke met the same resistance, though the monkey gave no sign of moving, that it had ever moved.
“This is weird.”
“I don’t think he’s dead.” There was a heartbeat feel to living things, and the monkey had it.
“Pick him up. There’s room in my bag and if he wakes up he can eat the coffee.”
She started to say that marmosets don’t eat coffee, but she didn’t know what they ate besides bunny heads and little girls’ hair.
“Hang on. I want to see something.” She poked it again. The tip of the dipstick missed the monkey, though her aim had been perfect, dead on for the belly. “Huh.”
Mr. Pete’s screen door slammed. “Denny Prater, are you skipping school?”
“We got let out early. Me and Nedda are walking home.”
“Sure looks like it, you being in the truck and all. You in there, Nedda Sue?”
She stuck a hand up and waved. Denny hopped out and went to talk to Mr. Pete. Denny was easy to talk to and he was Pop Prater’s kid so everybody knew him; at some point or other everyone in Easter worked for Prater Citrus. Everyone but her dad.
She jabbed with the dipstick again, but couldn’t seem to touch the monkey. And it still hadn’t blinked. If it was dead she was about to break a million rules. If it was alive, she was about to get scalped. She set the dipstick down and stretched her index finger, pointed at one of the too-big eyes, and stabbed.
