My Year Zero

by Rachel Gold

  I put on my iPod, more Halestorm at high volume, and went through the kitchen and bathroom tidying up. I got done well before Sierra was due back from work so I went to the grocery store to stock the fridge and pick up dinner. This was so different from picking up items on my father’s list and feeling like a kid. I was choosing what I wanted to make for dinner for my girlfriend.

  Sierra texted to say she had to run an errand and she’d be late. Did I want her to pick up food? I told her I had dinner and not to worry.

  You’re the best, she wrote. What would I do without you!

  I wanted to feel happy, but I remembered Kordell saying: “You put out for her.”

  I heated up spaghetti sauce and sautéed hamburger to go in it.

  Sierra texted again, I’ve got a surprise for you.

  She came in minutes later with a large, flat white box, the kind sweaters come in. (I did not think she’d gotten me a sweater.) I said a brief and very silent prayer that it wasn’t a dress as she set it on the dining room table and told me to open it.

  I forced a smile and lifted the top half of the box. It wasn’t a dress. And it sure wasn’t a sweater.

  It was a whole bunch of pale lace.

  I found two straps and lifted. A lacy camisole? Or more like a lace corset-like nightie with matching panties. I put a palm under the top layer of the mostly-sheer panties and contemplated the white embroidered rose against my skin.

  My head went thick with the density of the what-the-fuckness I was feeling.

  “You’re going to look so amazing in that,” Sierra said.

  My first clear thought was: I hate roses.

  Followed by: I hate dresses. And you got me a rose-embroidered lace bedroom dress? I’m sixteen, do you get that? Sixteen fucking years old, what do I need lingerie for?

  I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth and said, “Wow, thanks.”

  “Try it on,” she insisted.

  “Let’s eat dinner first. You know, in case we’re busy afterward.”

  The words came so easily to my mouth but sounded so flat to my ears. Sierra grinned and followed me into the kitchen. I drained the spaghetti and poured the sauce into a big plastic bowl while she put plates and silverware on the table.

  I wasn’t in the habit of asking God for favors, but I said a quick prayer along the lines of: seriously, you have to help me out here. I’ll owe you. I promise.

  And yet, lightning did not strike the dining room table.

  Sierra carried the spaghetti out, pushed the lingerie box to the far side of the table and started serving onto our plates. I picked up the sauce.

  I’d like to say I planned it, but it was a bona fide miracle. My toes hit the mismatch between the kitchen linoleum and the dining room wood and twisted in. The trailing foot snagged against the leading foot and I went down.

  The sauce went up.

  Gravity happened—all across the end of the dining room table, one chair and part of the wall.

  I was on my side on the floor, hands wrapped around my ankle, pain and shock bouncing along my nerves. A glop of red sauce, weighted by a piece of meat, dripped off the side of the table and splatted onto the floor. I almost laughed but the pain kept me somber. I’d twisted my ankle and smacked my knee landing. I couldn’t tell how bad the damage was.

  Sierra knelt in front of me. “Lauren, are you okay?”

  “Ankle,” I said. “Hurts. I don’t know. Ice?”

  She got a bag in the kitchen, filled it with ice and wrapped it in a dishtowel. I watched red sauce drip steadily from the edge of the table to the floor like a warm, soothing summer rain.

  Sierra put the ice pack on the coffee table in the living room and came back to help me up. I was limping, but I could put light pressure on my foot already without searing pain so it wasn’t serious, maybe not even a sprain. (I’d sprained my ankle already three times in my life due to my excessive grace.) This was more of a twist. It would be sore for a few days, maybe swell a little, but not turn half my foot purple.

  I let Sierra fuss around propping me up with pillows and setting the ice pack just right. Then she had to go clean up the mess. I could see from where I sat that a good cup or more of sauce had landed on the lingerie. Sierra made sad noises and went to wash it in cold water and hang it up.

  I wanted to take a pic and send it to Blake. Maybe I was a huge jerk, but I was a happy jerk.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Sierra and I spent Saturday night watching movies and icing my ankle. By Sunday it was puffy but walkable. The lingerie, however, did not recover. It was a ghastly orange in the places where it was supposed to be white. I offered to try it on anyway, knowing Sierra would say no.

  Sunday evening Sierra wanted to go to a poetry reading and party with a few of the other students who’d been in her writing class last spring. Dustin was having people over again (probably as a way to see more of Gabby). Sierra said I should go to Dustin’s without her. I wondered if she’d invented going to a poetry reading as a test. Like she wanted to send me off without her to a place where Blake would be and have Dustin report back. I hoped I was being paranoid.

  When I got to Dustin’s place, Gabby, Bear and Roy were there.

  “Where’s Sierra?” Bear asked.

  “She had a party, some literary thing.”

  “Sounds riveting,” Bear said. “Can I look at your sketches? I like what you’ve been uploading.”

  We spent about an hour with our heads bent over my sketchbook and hers. Roy looked for a few minutes before wandering off to join Gabby and Dustin. Bear thought my take on josei manga was awesome (turning the usual girl-oriented domestic manga style more sinister) and we swapped recommendations for what to read.

  Blake and Kordell came in while we were talking. I nodded in their direction, but didn’t get up. Bear and I were furiously discussing the many merits of Moyoco Anno’s In Clothes Called Fat.

  They got drinks and food. Kordell sat in the armchair with Blake on the end of the couch. For a long time they were talking quietly together. After they’d eaten, Blake started pacing around and behind Kordell. Even from across the room, I could hear her well enough.

  “No, you can’t add one to it,” she was saying. “You can’t. The natural numbers are already infinite, you can’t make them more infinite. That’s not how it works. There isn’t more of infinity, there are orders of infinity. Orders. Don’t you get it? The continuum of real numbers has the same cardinality as the power set of the integers.”

  “Blake,” Kordell said. “Slow down, please.”

  She sighed and stepped away from the back of his chair to stand by the glass doors of Dustin’s balcony, staring out into the night. Kordell came over to me. I felt a flash of fear, like he was going to ask me to do something and I didn’t know what it would be. And it was fear for Blake…no, fear of her. She was different tonight, harder and faster than usual.

  “Do you have spare paper and a pencil?” he asked.

  “Oh sure.”

  I carefully ripped a few pages out of the middle of my sketchpad and gave them to him with a pencil. He took them over to Blake and handed them to her.

  “Can you show me why I can’t just add one?” he asked.

  She followed him back to the couch. Bear was watching them too so we stopped pretending we were talking to each other.

  Blake sat down, pencil moving on the page while she talked, “Okay so, you’ve got the natural numbers, one, two, three, etc. and they’re infinite but they’re countable. If you had infinite time or whatever, you could count them. So you can’t add one, because whatever number that makes, you’d get to it eventually in your counting so it’s already in that infinity. It’s part of it. It’s in the infinite set of those numbers. Infinity plus infinity is infinity. That’s part of the mathematics of infinities.”

  The fear melted away as I listened to her. Hard and fast words, but Blake’s words, her ideas, her voice. I crossed the room to lean over the back of the couch
and see what she was writing. There were a bunch of numbers and circles inside of circles. It didn’t make sense to me, but I wasn’t a math geek.

  “I have a question,” I said.

  Blake looked up at me. Her eyes were wild but still Blake, only brighter and faster than I was used to. I felt stupid for having been afraid. I’d let Sierra’s shitty remarks get inside my head.

  I grinned at her and she grinned back.

  I said, “I don’t understand what happens when you get to the end of infinity. I know infinity isn’t supposed to have an end, but I keep thinking there has to be something outside of it. It kind of drives me nuts.”

  “Oh! That’s awesome. I’ll show you.”

  Her contagious excitement swept away the usual panic I had around this subject. Plus she thought she could answer it for me. I sat down on the other side of her from Kordell. Close enough to lean over the paper with her, but not so close that we were touching.

  “First you need to imagine there’s a hotel with infinitely many rooms,” she said.

  “I can’t picture that,” I told her. “But I’ll imagine that I can imagine it. Does that work?”

  She bumped my shoulder with hers and drew a rectangle on the side of the page with squares for windows. “Let’s say this hotel stretches away to infinity in the back. And each room is full—but you want to spend your vacation there. What do you do?”

  “Hook up with someone in a room?” I suggested.

  She laughed. “Or you go to the guy at the front desk and you tell him: ‘Hey, put the person in room one into room two, and the person in room two into room three and so on, and give me room one.’”

  She wrote on the paper: 1, 2, 3, 4…

  And under that: Lauren’s room, 1, 2, 3…

  “That hurts my brain,” I said.

  “What you need to know is that it’s countable. You can count anything you put into the rooms. And you can put different things into the rooms, but anything that can be put in rooms is countable. Countable infinity, get it?”

  I said, “So there’s more than one kind of number that you can put into rooms in the hotel. And every kind of number that can have rooms you could count if you had infinite time…and infinite patience and infinite caffeine.”

  She was still grinning, but I was scared again. Scared of the numbers, which felt idiotic. Just because you could count all the numbers if you had infinite time, that didn’t help me. I needed to know what happened when you got to the end of them. Or if there was no end, how was there no end? What would happen to me if I got outside of the numbers?

  “Hey, I’m going to head out,” Bear said. “Lauren, thanks for the chat. Anyone need a ride?”

  Kordell put his hand on Blake’s knee. “Dearest, do you want to go?”

  “No,” she said, like that was a stupid question.

  He leaned around her and caught my eye. “Can you drive her home later?”

  “I can take the bus,” Blake said crossly.

  “Let me drive you,” I offered. “We might need the extra time for you to explain all this infinity stuff to me.”

  “Sure. Thanks,” she said and got up to give Kordell a hug and a kiss as he stood up. “Tell your mom her pie was ridiculous.”

  After Bear and Kordell left, Dustin asked if he could have the couch so he could watch a movie with Gabby (and Roy, but I doubt he was part of Dustin’s plan). Blake and I moved to the nook. She stood, shifting in place, frowning.

  “Can we go somewhere?” she asked.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t care. I need to be moving. Is that cool?”

  “Yeah, we can drive around. Maybe go around the lakes?”

  “I love the lakes at night,” she said.

  We said our goodbyes and went down to my car. She pointed me in the direction of the lakes. We opened windows and Blake put her hand out to wiggle her fingers in the warm night air.

  Even though the sun was down, the first lake was crowded with people walking. Following Blake’s directions, I drove to the next one and the next, curling around the big, dark basins of water. The houses got more ornate, different styles, some lit up inside, some dark.

  Seeing Blake’s silhouette in the diffuse light, I wanted to kiss her again. I wanted to tell her about the spaghetti sauce but I didn’t want to say Sierra’s name and I certainly didn’t want to bring up lingerie.

  “Let’s go somewhere and walk,” Blake said. “There’s a park up that way. Can we go?”

  “Sure.”

  I followed her instructions and we ended up in a parking lot by a golf course.

  “Huh,” she said. “This isn’t quite what I was going for, but I think I know where we are. Come on, there’s supposed to be a gap in the fence back there. We can get through.”

  “Should we?”

  She shrugged. “Do you want to stay here?”

  She wasn’t saying it rhetorically and meaning that I was a jerk if I stayed here, but honestly wondering if I wanted to stay in the car in the parking lot. The fact was, I did not. I wanted to follow her, to spend the whole night following her around wherever she wanted to go.

  “Let’s go,” I told her.

  We went around the back of the fence for half a block. We found the spot where the fencing was loose and could be pulled up enough for us to squeeze through. The whole place was ghostly silent. As we walked onto the green, the lights of the city streets faded away and the stars came out.

  “You should come up to Duluth sometime,” I told her. “We get the northern lights and they’re amazing.”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  I didn’t have a word for what she was to me. “Friend” sounded so elementary school and yet this wasn’t all that romantic; she hadn’t touched me all night except to bump my shoulder. Whatever was between and around us felt deep, fathomless.

  We got to the top of a short rise and Blake dropped down onto her back, staring up at the sky. I lowered myself next to her.

  “You want to know what’s out there?” she asked. Her voice was slower than it had been at the party. The night settled warm and heavy around us.

  “I’m afraid of what’s out there,” I whispered.

  “It’s not like you think it is.”

  “How do you know what I think?”

  “I don’t,” she admitted. “What do you think?”

  I’d never tried to explain this before, but in the dark, not looking at her, I could say it. “I keep thinking about the end of everything. That it has to end somewhere and then there must be an outside and what is that outside? What would happen to me if I got to the end of it all? I’m afraid of not existing, that there’s a point you can get to and there’s nothing. Real nothing. And if I get there, I’ll be nothing too.”

  I shuddered. Her fingers touched my elbow and moved away.

  She said, “We talked about countable infinities, so the next question is whether there are infinities we can’t count.”

  “Are there?”

  “Yes,” she said. She said some things about rational and irrational numbers, about what was and wasn’t countable, but I was distracted by the sound of her “yes” in the deepening night.

  When she paused, I asked, “Do you think I could I get a room at the infinite hotel?”

  “Are you a rational number?” She sounded dubious.

  “Probably not. What are my other choices?”

  “Irrational, imaginary, transcendental, transfinite…”

  “Which are you?” I asked.

  “Transfinite for sure. I think you might be transcendental. Pi is transcendental and that’s a pretty artsy number.”

  “Thanks for not calling me irrational,” I said.

  “Oh pi is also irrational.”

  Alerted by the rustle of grass, I peeked over to see her grinning at me. In the dark, this close, her eyes were bluegrass and charcoal. If I had infinite time to draw her, I would never be able to draw her just right, like this.

  “
Bitch,” I said lightly. The word came out more breath than sound.

  “Like that’s a bad thing,” she replied.

  “You listened to Halestorm.”

  I almost reached out for her but I pulled a blade of grass out of the green instead and rubbed it between my finger and thumb.

  “Are you trying to get me to stop talking about math?” she asked with a sigh, turning her face back up to the sky.

  “No, go on. You were about to blow my mind.”

  “You don’t know the half.”

  She was quiet for a bit. There wasn’t any wind, but the air around us shifted as the night cooled a degree. The lazy, moving air brought me the smell of her shampoo and the earthy-sweet-maple scent that I knew was Blake.

  I focused on the distant stars and tried not to think about how close her body was. I wanted to kiss her so much the roots of my teeth ached.

  Blake held a hand up to the sky and made a circle with her thumb and forefinger.

  “Let’s say that this is the countable infinities,” she said.

  She circled the first circle of her fingers with the fingers of the other hand to indicate a circle inside of a circle.

  “And you have a kind of uncountable infinity that comes from taking all the numbers in that first infinity and putting them into all their possible combinations. There’s a more accurate way to say it, but if I start talking about power sets, you’re going to change the subject, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” I agreed. “But basically you’re saying a bunch of uncountable stuff makes a super infinity, right?”

  “Yeah,” she chuckled. “Super infinity, they should have called it that. They didn’t, though. The countable infinities are called aleph zero or aleph null.”

  “That’s perfect,” I interrupted her. “The aleph. It’s the first letter in the name of the unnamable God.”

  “How do you know that? I mean, I read that somewhere but how do you know that?”

  “Years of Hebrew school,” I said.

  She laughed. “Fantastic. The aleph is the symbol for an order of infinity. So aleph zero is the first infinity and then there’s aleph one.”