by Sigal Samuel
After a while, I fell asleep on the couch.
When I woke up again, it was because the noise of the TV had suddenly disappeared. The silence confused me, so I opened my eyes and there was Dad, standing over me and smiling. I could tell he’d just come back from the university because he had that tired look on his face and his briefcase in one hand. Holding the remote in his other hand, he plopped into the armchair and said, “Hello. Sorry I woke you. How come you’re not in bed?”
I yawned. “Fell asleep watching TV.”
“Nothing good on, huh?”
“Not really.” I twisted my neck and saw Dad flipping channels. “What are you doing?”
“Mmm? Oh, just seeing what’s on.”
“But I mean, why are you watching it on mute? You could turn the volume back on, since I’m up anyways?”
A funny smile came over his face. “It’s something I picked up from your mom, I guess,” he said. “You know, she used to like to find the stupidest shows on TV, I mean the most truly awful soap operas in the world, and then turn the volume all the way down so she could make up what the characters were saying. God, she loved to do that. I would find her sitting here sometimes, making up dialogue and laughing her head off.”
I froze. Dad was like Sammy, he almost never talked about Mom. Once in a while something would remind him of her and he would tell me some random fact, like the name of her favorite chocolate bar (Milky Way) or her favorite Beatle (George). But that was it.
Then I had a genius idea. Maybe if I did the voices for the characters on TV, it would make Dad so happy that he would want to tell me stuff about Mom all the time!
I concentrated hard on the episode of Star Trek playing on the screen. A Klingon guy was talking to a woman while their ship crashed through space, lights flashing like crazy all around them. I put on a woman’s voice: “Excuse me, sir, but your skin is breaking out. Your forehead looks like it’s got a mountain growing out of it! You should really try that new face wash I got you for your birthday.” Then I switched to the man’s voice: “Um, can we talk about this later? Our ship’s about to crash!” Then I did the woman’s voice again: “Stop trying to change the subject. You’re always so sensitive!” Then the ship tilted over and the characters fell down, so I said, “Your turn, Dad!” But when the man’s mouth started moving again, Dad didn’t say anything. I looked over my shoulder and he was just sitting there, staring at me.
His eyes flashed with anger. The muscles in his face were all twisted up for a second, then they went flat again. He turned off the TV and got up. “It’s late,” he said. “Time for me to turn in. Good night.”
As his back disappeared down the dark hall, I caught a whiff of perfume coming off him. That’s when I understood why he’d gotten so mad. If he was still sniffing Mom’s old perfume bottle, sometimes even spritzing it on himself, that meant he still really missed her. It probably hurt him to be reminded of her, just like it hurt Sammy.
“Good night,” I whispered, but I don’t think he heard me. The door to his room was already closed.
The next day was hot and quiet. Most Saturdays, me and Sammy played Snakes and Ladders or Monopoly or Scrabble, but today she had her best friend over. Actually, Jenny was her only friend. Even though Sammy was one grade above her, they’d known each other forever because our dad and her dad taught at the same university and our families were friends. When Mom died, Jenny’s parents said they could watch me and Sammy after school every day so that Dad could work late and wouldn’t have to hire a housekeeper. He told them sure, thanks, why not.
Now Sammy was playing with Jenny in her room, and the door was closed, and I didn’t want to knock in case Sammy was still mad at me.
So instead I turned around to face the door to Dad’s study. It was closed, too. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened the night before: how he’d told me something cool about Mom completely out of the blue, and how maybe, if I was lucky, he might do the same today. I went ahead and did something I hadn’t done in ages. I knocked.
“What?” He didn’t like being interrupted when he was working.
I opened the door a few inches and said, “Hi.”
Without taking his eyes off the book in front of him, he said, “Do you need something?”
“No.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“Sick?”
“No.”
“Well then? What is it?”
I didn’t know what to say. Finally, I said, “I’m bored.”
He sighed. Then he put a finger on the page to mark his place and looked up from his book. I couldn’t tell what it was but the letters on the cover were in Hebrew. There were a dozen other books stacked up all over the desk, and a million more on the messy shelves behind him. One of them, I knew, even had his name on it: The Unorthodox Kabbalah, by David Meyer. Near his elbow were a slice of toast and a half-finished cup of coffee, but I could tell he’d forgotten all about them. “Where’s your sister?” he asked.
“In her room.”
“What’s she up to?”
“Hanging out with Jenny. Painting or drawing or something.”
“Well, why don’t you ask them to play a game with you?”
“They won’t want to play with me.”
“You don’t know until you ask.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask.”
“Great.” He shot me a smile and looked down at his book. “Would you close the door?”
I closed the door.
In the hall, my eyes landed on a couple of picture frames that had been sitting on the same table for as long as I could remember. One showed Dad the year before Mom died, back when he was still religious and had a beard. He was sitting in his study with a book in his hand and a look on his face like he was itching to get back to it.
The other picture showed Mom around the same time. I picked it up and ran a fingertip over the glass. I traced her smiling eyes and her big, laughing mouth. I wished I could see more of her, but her long-sleeved dress hid every inch of skin, all the way up to her neck. Her hair was tucked away under a plain blue scarf. Still, she glowed.
The last time I saw Dad with a beard was ages ago, when I was five. Dad had bought a new book and he and Mom were having a big fight about it. I was in bed, so they thought I was asleep, but I could hear every word coming through their bedroom door. Then Dad stormed into the bathroom. I tiptoed into the hall and saw him shaving his beard, but he didn’t see me. A few days later Mom came home with her head shaved and a wig to wear over it instead of her usual scarf. I felt sad because one, I used to like playing with her long, shiny hair, and two, after she did that Dad didn’t say a word all day and then the next day it was too late to say anything because Mom got hit by a car and died.
For the millionth time, I wished she were still alive so she could play with me right now, and also so she could get Dad to come out of his study. Ever since she died, he mostly stayed cooped up in there. Somehow I thought if she was around, he would be happier and would want to spend a lot more time hanging out with me and Sammy. But she was gone, and his door was closed, and there wasn’t anything I could do to fix that—at least not right then.
I put down the photo, opened a closet, and took out the Snakes and Ladders board. But instead of knocking on Sammy’s door, I went into the backyard and set up the game on the grass. I rolled the dice and moved my token six spaces forward. I rolled again and landed on a ladder and shot up two rows. I rolled three more times and landed on a snake and dropped all the way down to the bottom again. When I got tired of playing against myself, I lay back and stared at the sky until my eyes started to close. The next thing I knew my ears were full of ringing and somebody was calling my name.
Inside, I followed Sammy’s voice to the front door. She was making small talk with Alex, who was glancing back and forth between her face and his shoes with a half-excited, half-terrified expression. “So, what do you like to do when you’re not at school?�
� she asked.
He mumbled something that sounded like “Look at the stars.”
“Cool,” she said. “I love looking at the stars.”
“Really?” He beamed. “But actually, I said ‘listen,’ not ‘look.’”
“You listen to the stars? How can you listen to stars?”
“They send us messages all the time,” he said seriously. “And I mean, if there’s intelligent life up there, don’t you think it would be trying to communicate with us?”
Sammy stared at him. His cheeks and the tips of his ears glowed bright pink.
“Hello,” I said.
“Oh!” Alex said, glancing at me. “Hi, Lev. Do you want to go play? Um, basketball?”
I blinked at the basketball in his hands. I couldn’t believe he was here, at my house, wanting to play sports. Because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I said, “Where?”
“At my place, I have a hoop in my driveway, remember?” Then I guess he realized that I’d never actually been to his place. “Well, you don’t have to, I just thought you might want to.”
I asked Sammy if it was okay. She shrugged and said she didn’t see why not. Then she turned back to Alex. “What did you mean, the stars are sending us messages all the time?”
“I can show you, if you want. I’ve got all the equipment set up in my room. You can come with us, if you’re not busy?”
“Yeah, I’d like to see—”
“Samara?”
We all turned around. Jenny was standing in the doorway of Sammy’s room. None of us had noticed her, but I wasn’t too surprised by that, because Jenny was the kind of person you could not notice for a long time. She pushed a strand of blond hair away from her freckled face and said, “My mom’s not coming to pick me up for another half hour.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Sammy told her. “I’ll stay till your mom gets here, definitely.”
“And then you’ll come over to my house, right?” Alex asked.
“Sure,” Sammy said. “What’s your address?”
He gave it to her. Then we waved good-bye and the two of us headed off down the block.
At the corner, we bumped into a couple of old Hasidic men, who had stopped all of a sudden when the streetlight turned red. They wore fur hats and short black pants and white stockings, and talked really fast in Yiddish. The fringes that poked out from under their coats dangled almost to the ground. Then the light turned green and they rushed ahead. We kept on walking.
“What’s with those white stockings?” Alex whispered. “They look like girls’ clothes.”
“I asked my dad about them once, actually. Because some of the Hasids around here wear white stockings and some wear black and I didn’t understand why.”
“And?”
“And he said it might have to do with which sect they belong to. There are lots of different Hasidic sects in Mile End: Belz, Satmar, Bobov, Munkacs, Skver, Vishnitz, you name it. But when I asked how you could tell the different sects apart, he just said, ‘Who cares?’”
Alex shrugged like maybe that was a logical response. After a minute he said, “Lev.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s a weird name.”
“Oh. I guess.”
“What does it mean? Does it mean something?”
“It’s Hebrew for ‘heart.’”
“Where’d you get a name like that?”
“Um. My parents gave it to me?”
“Obviously. But like, what made them decide to call you heart? Were you named after somebody famous or something?”
“I don’t think so.”
“They just thought that would be a cool name?”
“I guess.”
“Oh. Well.”
I was going to tell him not to sound so disappointed when he came to a stop in front of a redbrick driveway, the only one on the street with a basketball hoop. I didn’t know what to say. All these years we’d been living just two blocks apart and I’d never even noticed.
I wanted to start playing right away but Alex said I should really let him give me some lessons first because he’d seen my layups in gym class and they weren’t very scientific. He kept shooting and missing and saying, “Oops, okay, I miscalculated there, but this game is all about physics, trust me, just watch,” and then he’d shoot and miss again. After about twenty minutes, I stole the ball from him and dribbled it up to the net and shot and scored.
“Nice one!” called a voice.
I turned around and saw Sammy. “Thanks!” I called back, then added, “Alex was just giving me some pointers.”
“That’s nice of you,” Sammy said to Alex. The tips of his ears went bright pink again.
Then he led us inside to get Popsicles out of the freezer. There were only three left, a cherry, an orange, and a grape. I claimed the cherry. Alex let Sammy have the orange one even though I could tell that he didn’t like grape, because, really, who does?
Except for us, the kitchen was empty. As far as I could tell, there was no one else home.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“My mom’s at work. She’s a nurse at the hospital.”
“What about your dad?”
“He lives in Toronto.”
I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so I didn’t say anything. Six seconds passed.
Then Alex announced, “I was named after somebody famous.”
“Really?” Sammy asked. “Who?”
“My grandfather. My mom’s dad.”
“He was famous?”
“Sure.”
“What was his name?”
“Aleksandr Leonidovich Zaitsev.”
“What did he do?”
“Aleksandr Leonidovich Zaitsev? He was only one of the most important astronomers of all time! Who do you think came up with the idea for SETI?”
“What’s SETI?” me and Sammy asked at the same time.
“What’s SETI? The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence!” Alex cried. Then he pointed upstairs. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
Alex’s room was small and messy and full of light. In one corner was a big white computer set up on a big white desk. In another corner was a huge white bookcase packed with books. The bed took up the third corner, and the sheets were decorated with spaceships and comets and shooting stars. In front of the window stood a white telescope, skinny and long. The floor was almost impossible to walk on. It was covered in heaps of ancient stuff: telephones, batteries, keyboards, computer mice, wires in red and blue and green and yellow, and, on top of the nearest pile, a TV remote control that someone, probably Alex, had taken apart.
“What’s this?” Sammy asked, trailing her finger along a shiny antenna.
“That’s my ham radio,” Alex said proudly. “It lets me communicate with amateur radio operators all around the world. My mom got it for me for Christmas last year.”
“And is that how you hear the other messages, too? The ones from the stars?”
He smiled, then shook his head. “For that, you need a way bigger radio.”
Alex explained that there was a group of astronomers who, instead of using normal telescopes to look at the universe’s light, used radio telescopes to listen to its noise.
“Here, check it out,” Alex said, waving us over to his computer. “This is SETI.”
We went and looked at the screen. It was full of weird symbols I didn’t understand. Squiggly waves, charts, and numbers. In the top left-hand corner, it said, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home, and then there was a picture of a satellite.
“Okay, so pretend you’re a radio astronomer. What you’re listening for with your radio telescope is a pattern hidden in the noise coming from outer space. That type of signal doesn’t happen naturally, so if you detect it, that could mean evidence of alien technology. Okay?”
“Okay,” we said.
“So, once you pick up a pattern, what do you do? Well, so maybe you analyze the data digitally on your big gino
rmous supercomputer. But the more computer power you have, right, the more frequency ranges you can cover—and the more sensitivity you’ve got, too. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So, in 1995, this guy named David Gedye said, hey, why don’t we use the Internet to hook up, say, a million computers, like the ones in people’s houses, to do some of this work for us? And that’s exactly what he did. And that’s what my computer is doing right now.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?”
“Why would you want a bunch of people you don’t even know using your computer?”
Alex looked at me like he couldn’t believe his ears. “Because it’s cool,” he said. “Because it’s science.” Then, just to make sure I understood how cool it was, he did a search for “Arecibo message.” He explained that SETI astronomers broadcast this radio message into outer space back in 1974. It was the first message human beings ever sent out on purpose. They aimed it at something called globular star cluster M13, which was approximately twenty-five thousand light years away. It was their way of saying hello. They were still waiting for a response.
Sammy pointed to an image on the screen. It showed a telescope, a stick figure, and something that looked like a strip of human DNA. “What’s that?”
“That’s the message.”
“It’s a picture.”
“So?”
“So I thought you said the message was noise.”
“So?”
“So how can the message be a picture if it’s also noise?”
“Well, because the message is written in binary.”
She looked confused, so Alex typed in “Binary” and what came up on the screen then was line after line after line of numbers.
Not just any old numbers, but zeros and ones specifically.
I was so excited, I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to keep from showing it.
“Think of the binary system like code,” Alex said. “Morse code also has two symbols: dots and dashes. It’s always either one or the other. Dot or dash. Zero or one.” He tapped a finger on the desk. “Think of each tap as one and each rest as zero. That’s all you need, see? You can say anything you want in the whole universe using just those symbols, and anyone else in the universe, as long as they know the code, can understand you and send a message back.”
