Life at the Speed of Us

by Heather Sappenfield

  I clicked on the prompt, anxious to see this guy who was rocking my world.

  His image pushed me back in my chair. Obviously paralyzed, Hawking slouched in a wheelchair that resembled a cockpit. The caption called him one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein. He wore round glasses, his lower lip jutted out showing bottom teeth, and his head lolled toward one shoulder.

  I clicked on the link to his website, magnified the text, and read his bio a bunch of times till I was sure I’d gotten it right.

  In 1963, the year Dad was born, Hawking contracted motor neuron disease. Doctors said he had two years to live. But he went on, lived more fully because of it, even though the disease hijacked his body. He became the Lucasian Professor at Cambridge College, England. Isaac freaking Newton was a past Lucasian Professor. In 1985, Hawking got pneumonia, and because he was paralyzed, doctors had to do a tracheotomy. My hand came to my throat as I read that, imagining the sensation of having a hole cut in my windpipe so I could breathe. After that surgery, Hawking couldn’t even talk anymore. He communicated using his eyebrows to indicate yes or no to letters. I thought about how if he had dyslexia he’d get his right and left eyebrows confused, but then shame rose in me.

  A guy sent Hawking a computer that had lists of words, so he could choose one with eye movements. He wrote lectures and books at the rate of fifteen words per minute. That meant it took him four seconds—an eternity in brain time—to get down a word. That was maybe slower than me. Currently, he was Cambridge’s Director of Research at the Center for Theoretical Cosmology. This guy who couldn’t even lift his own head, let alone speak, was changing our universe’s definition. He was peeking up God’s robe.

  I studied my hands on the table. I fluttered my fingers, and pain sizzled my upper arm. Yet this injury would heal. My ribs would heal. My heart might never heal, but I’d live on. My only problem was the tangling alphabet. I rested my forehead on my hands, and as Wash bellowed, “Shite!” at the TV, I swore I’d be less of a whiner.

  A text arrived. Gage: LIED THAT KISS. I read it again: LIKED THAT KISS.

  I glanced at Dad. Gage would be nothing compared to what I’d done today. Yet what had I done today? Had that boogieman from my childhood actually been there in front of me, or was I losing my mind? Brain fritzing, I powered down my computer and stood at the back of the couch, obviously headed toward bed. Dad and Wash didn’t even notice.

  I considered Súmáí and Gage and the vision-Mom and me and Hawking. How could we all exist? Were Gage and I any more real than vision-Mom or Súmáí? Or even Hawking? My mind searched for a pattern. I couldn’t stop thinking about how the narrator reading his book had said time could bend. I studied Dad and Wash, consumed by a soccer game that happened yesterday on the other side of the globe. Right now, that game was more real to them than me standing here. Maybe resting my palm against that spruce was like choosing a channel on the TV? Trees and porcupines as remote controls to other universes?

  I stared at Crispy’s lemon bars on the coffee table and remembered that group hug from him and Sarge last night. I closed my eyes until that anchoring moment was more real than anything else around me.

  I woke to hushed, urgent voices in the main room.

  “On the deck,” Wash whispered. “I’m sure of it.”

  “We need to check the pumps,” Dad said.

  The pumps were the snowcat gas station, camouflaged in the pines on City Center’s far side.

  I rushed from bed toward the sound of rustling coats and scuffing boots.

  “Hey, Sov.” Wash wriggled his eyebrows.

  Dad was serious. “We heard a noise.”

  Tara’s voice rose in my memory: They give you a gun? “Do you have guns?” I said.

  Dad held up a weird-looking, six-inch gun-thing.

  “Tasers.” Wash grinned like a maniac.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Sov, these are vandals, not murderers. I save lives, not end them. Don’t worry. It’s probably nothing,” Dad said.

  Wash mimicked a spy peering around the corner and dashed out the door.

  Dad paused, hand on the knob. “Stay inside,” he said with a piercing look and left.

  The pocket of frigid air they’d let in drifted across me, and I shivered. Out the window, shadow swallowed them. I shuffled to the bedroom, crawled across my bed, leaned against the log wall, and gathered the covers around me.

  In the window above Dad’s bed, a face appeared. I hate to admit it, but I screamed. I looked closer. It was Súmáí.

  He grinned and held up our two quills. He looked left, and I heard the cabin’s door rattle and burst open. Súmáí pointed at me, then at his chest, and disappeared.

  “Sov?” Dad called.

  “I’m fine!” I called back. “Sorry about that.”

  Dad entered the bedroom. He studied me.

  “Find anything?” I said.

  “Tracks around the porch. Wash is still out there. You’re okay?”

  I nodded.

  I listened for the door to close behind Dad, then rushed to the bedroom window and peered out. I remembered Súmáí’s speed with his bow and Tara’s black eye. Súmáí + Dad and Wash = someone gets hurt, maybe killed.

  I grabbed my parka, rushed onto the deck, and paced back and forth to show my concern for Dad and Wash. See me, Súmáí, I prayed, over and over till it became a four-beat rhythm in my head, yet all the while, I wondered if I’d imagined him.

  Finally Dad and Wash came trudging back.

  “Dammit, Sov! I told you to stay inside!” Dad said.

  I scanned the dark and thought I glimpsed movement in the bordering pines. I realized then that Súmáí had been wearing a dark green liftie’s parka.

  Bookmark:

  Clock

  Any device that measures time.

  15

  Of course, I stared at sleep the rest of the night. All I knew about Utes played across the ceiling until I finally got up and went out to the kitchen table to sit and stare into the dark and listen to Wash snore.

  Growing up in Crystal Village, I knew Utes inhabited this valley before the whites. Mom had a children’s book about them that she read to me. I don’t know where I first heard the legend about Utes setting the valley aflame when whites forced them onto reservations. Most locals knew it. Lots of folks said it wasn’t true, though. I’d also heard that whites actually set the fire to incite further rage against and flush out any hiding Utes. There was no way to ever know the truth.

  In English, Lindholm had taught us how, for thousands of years, many Utes had summered here in the central Rocky Mountains and wintered in southern Colorado’s lower elevations. That was before Colorado was a state, just territory. Before Mexico had been forced to give up that territory in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. While the outside world had battled, the Utes had gone on with their traditional life, living in wickiups and interacting with Spanish traders. Lindholm taught us they’d warred with a tribe from the eastern plains called the Arapaho. That they’d been forced to reservations in Colorado’s western red desert, or Utah’s wasteland. That there’d been a drought in that fire year, and lightning’s spark may have been what set things aflame. One thing was certain: across Crystal Mountain’s back bowls, limbless charred trunks were sprinkled like inverted black icicles.

  Nowadays, Utes visited Crystal Village to bless a new lodge or perform a snow dance on a lean year. I hoped they charged a fortune for their services.

  From what I’d learned about quantum physics, I figured Súmáí could be from the past, present, or future. But how could he be here, prowling around? Away from that spruce and moving freely in my universe? Granted, I was new to quantum physics, but I hadn’t heard Hawking’s narrator speak of anything that would make me think I could actually enter other universes.

  I remembered the comment abou
t time travel. Maybe Súmáí did come from my universe, but from the time before the fire. Or maybe he came from an alternate reality, where whites had never stolen this valley. Where Europeans had never even conquered America. That set me pondering whether time moved vertically or horizontally or maybe both, and how that would plot on a graph. Stop! I thought. Probability would indicate he was a figment of my crazed mind.

  Dad ambled out of the bedroom. He walked to Wash’s chain-saw snoring and nudged him.

  “Huh? What?” Wash said.

  “Wake up.”

  I couldn’t see Wash over the couch’s back, but he made a blubbery noise that forced a smile on my face. Dad smiled too as he walked to the kitchen.

  “What has you up so early?” Dad said.

  I shrugged.

  Wash rested his cheek on the couch’s back and raised his eyebrows. He sighed. “I love the sound of your voice, Sov.”

  Dad ran water into a teakettle. He lit the burner and set it on the stove. He rubbed his hand back and forth over his cropped hair, and I crinkled my nose at his crew cut. It reminded me of porcupines, though, and before I knew it I’d said, “How many have there been?”

  Wash gave a victory thrust of his fist at my words.

  “How many what?” Dad said.

  I made a face at Wash. “Vandalism attacks.”

  Dad stiffened and crossed his arms. “Five.”

  “When did they begin?” I said.

  “Two months ago.”

  “So before my accident.” I tried to force myself calm. Of course, Súmáí had been coming here for years. I’d seen him when I was five. The vandalism was recent, though, so maybe that wasn’t him.

  Dad turned and started pouring coffee into the press. “Yes.”

  “That tree. On Pride,” I had to pause before speaking more. “Do you think it was vandalism?”

  He turned and studied me. “Might be. It makes no sense, that healthy tree falling like it did.”

  “Shite!” Wash’s words were sleepy. “What a sight. I almost peed myself.”

  “Was anything vandalized last night?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Dad said.

  “We scared them off with our badass tasers!” Wash said.

  “Okay, so they were here last night, and there was the attack on Tara at Sapphire East. When else have they been here?”

  The teakettle emitted popping sounds as it warmed. Something in Dad seemed to give. He leaned back against the counter. “A lift shack at City Center was broken into.”

  “And?”

  “They took a liftie uniform,” Wash said.

  My pulse turned loud in my ears.

  “And medicine from our stock,” Dad added.

  “Ski patrol?” I said.

  “I feel so violated,” Wash said. As Dad’s second in command, he ordered supplies for all three ski-patrol stations. “I catch ’em, I’m tasin’ ’em!”

  I held up three fingers, seeking more.

  “The Platinum Club—” Dad said.

  “Stole a bunch of slippers and most of the produce,” Wash said. “Those poor folks next day had to walk around in stocking feet with no salads. Hardship.” He shook his head, and one side of his lip curled up while his brow pressed down.

  I laughed despite myself. I held up four fingers.

  “The last one was Sapphire East. Took food again—produce, all the butter, all the salt, and every last bagel.”

  Five vandal incidents, I calculated. Last night nothing had been stolen, so far as we knew. But on the other trips they’d taken food, clothes, or medicine.

  “Maybe a band of homeless vegetarians has moved into Crystal Village,” Wash said.

  Dad snorted, lifted the whistling teakettle from its burner, and poured steaming water into the coffee press. He still held his torso like glass.

  “If they hadn’t clobbered Tara, I might have to respect them,” Wash said.

  I pictured Súmáí’s muscled arm, the hand that held our quills curving into a fist that struck. I shuddered.

  Dad eyed me, poured two cups of coffee, delivered one to Wash on the couch, and took a sip of his own. Wash slurped as Dad walked to the thermostat and turned up the heat.

  “What are you doing today?” he said.

  “A snowshoe.” I hadn’t told Dad I’d gone to the Shangri-La spruce, just that I’d headed out Sunset Ridge. Today, I had to confirm if Súmáí was real.

  “Where?” he said.

  “Same as yesterday,” I said.

  “Stay where people can see you. Okay?” Dad said.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Huh-uh.” Wash pointed at his eyes with two fingers, pointed at me with them, and then pointed at his eyes again.

  Bookmark:

  Time Dilation

  A moving clock runs

  slower than a stationary one.

  16

  I snowshoed on a mission, the headphones filling my ears with Hawking’s book. This time the going was easier; I followed my tracks from yesterday and headed out the narrow road to Last Chance ten minutes faster. Tucker skied past me, hauling a sled. He waved and gave me a puzzled look, no doubt wondering what I was doing out there on foot. I was destined to be seen by Dad’s employees and friends as long as I was within the borders of Crystal Mountain Resort.

  I crossed the boundary ropes, glancing over my shoulder and holding my breath until I was hidden by trees. I looked across the open stretch of Shangri-La. No new snowboard tracks. No snowboard tracks = no Gage. I thought of him yesterday, admitting he loved me as he stood thigh-deep in snow, and my legs turned watery. I thought of Dad when I’d lain in that sled at the base of Pride, tears streaming down his face.

  What was I doing? Heading toward Súmáí? A figment of my insanity, my childhood image of the boogieman? If not that, then a potentially lethal Ute? I halted, tugged down the headphones, and nudged up my sunglasses to rub my eyes.

  Short lines of contrails scuffed the sky. I watched a plane inch across the blue. The narrator had just been explaining Einstein’s relativity, and I considered how that plane was moving incredibly fast, but for the passengers peering out its oval windows, the world was still. I was just a spec passing below them. For them, time moved slower. A proven fact. Someone circling Earth forever would be younger at the end of fifty years.

  Time and reality. In Dad’s reality, I was lounging at the cabin or snowshoeing along a groomed run. In my reality, I might see vision-Mom today. These theories I was listening to—this math—reached to explain the world. And if equations ruled the world, if probability existed, fate was a myth. Maybe God too.

  I rubbed my furrowed brow through my hat as my mind circled back to Súmáí. He held answers. I had to reach his two-word world and make him explain it to me. There had to be a way back to Mom.

  I neared the spruce and stopped, noticing something I hadn’t seen before: the tree bent from the roots, reminding me of the angle of my Upward Dog belly-to-the-floor. Time was, Mom would make me join her for yoga. We’d crack up at how unlimber I was. I could hardly straighten my legs, and I’d keel over during standing poses like Warrior or Tree. But my Upward Dog was primo.

  That spruce, after its initial bend, reached toward the sky like it longed to fly. I heard Mom’s laugh in my memory, and then I heard her say, blue spruce.

  The full memory came to me: Mom reading a picture book naming all Colorado’s state things. Flower: columbine. Bird: lark bunting. Fish: green cutthroat trout. Tree: blue spruce. She’d made me read the names, and I could not make myself see the Ls or Rs. “Bue spuce,” I kept saying. “Lak butting.” “Geen cutthoat.” L + R + me = combat. “Again,” Mom said, till I got them right. Now, at almost nineteen, I usually heard their sounds, but I still struggled to get them in the right places on paper.

  As I neared t
he spruce, gold blotches appeared on its red-gray bark. When I stood close, they became places where sap had bled and dried. At eye-level, glossy dribbles marked a newer spot. They seemed like gilded tears. I considered this spruce’s age, the decades, maybe centuries, it had witnessed.

  I peered up through its branches, pressing my amulet bag to my chest, but discerned no porcupine. Funny how porcupines always seemed like wise old men. With what had happened, they seemed gatekeepers of a bridge invisible to humans.

  I looked around. Might humans be the only blind ones? Did the rest of the world exist in multiple realities at once? Or did they move between them? Did the lark bunting and columbine understand multiple existence? Did they understand the spruce’s ability to guide me on leaps to other universes? I considered whether all things but humans understood this, even rocks, and I felt so gypped. I shook my head: I was going insane. I needed Súmáí to be real.

  I stepped to the spruce, and, avoiding the gold spots, pressed my palm to it.

  Toasty breeze. Sun overhead.

  A hummingbird’s thrum.

  Mom spoke. I caught my breath. Mom? Here? I pretzeled myself in my arm and found us sitting on a blanket, about twenty yards out in Shangri-La’s meadow. I was maybe three years old. Late fall asters and yellow grass surrounded us. That little-me rose on my hands and knees to touch the page of a book Mom held open in her lap. I wore little kid jeans and a T-shirt, and my puffy butt revealed that I still wore pull-up diapers. I’d been murder to potty-train. “B, b, b, b,” I said.

  “B is for bighorn sheep, Colorado’s state animal.”

  “Big horns,” little-me said, getting the R just right.

  “Yes, their horns curl, don’t they?” Mom said.

  “Curl,” I said.

  “And B is for bumblebee.”

  I plopped onto my butt. “There.” My voice was so small as I pointed.

  “Yes! There’s a bumblebee, right there. You’re so smart, Sov,” Mom said. “What else starts with B?”