by Rachel Gold
“Is that the super infinity?” I asked.
She pushed up on her elbow and looked down at me. Her hair was tangled and rough with a piece of grass sticking out of one side.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “We have no way of knowing if it is or isn’t…That’s the problem with your question about what’s outside of infinity. Human minds can’t even figure out aleph one and we can barely guess at the alephs beyond that, at the increasing orders of infinity.”
She settled back on the grass and went on talking, “Some of the mathematicians who tried to study this went crazy. I mean, they didn’t have the good meds of the twenty-first century, but some people think it was the study of infinities that did it. Of course, you could also argue that it’s the crazy ones who can make the breakthroughs, who can understand these things and pull human thinking forward.”
“Do you think that?” I asked.
“Haven’t made up my mind about it yet,” she said. “What do you think?”
I didn’t know enough about craziness and genius to say anything remotely smart so I thought about her orders of infinity. I put my hands up and made a circle with my fingers and another circle around that.
I remembered the circles she’d drawn on the paper, one inside the other. I’d heard people say about the universe or about God “Oh, it’s too big to understand” and that had always sounded like a cop-out. Why it would be too big? If God made us, why shouldn’t we be able to understand everything?
But Blake made it make sense.
We couldn’t even count the first infinity, only understand that it was countable. And then there were many more orders of infinity out from that, like maybe an infinite amount. So when I tried to perceive it all and came to that place of nothingness, what I’d reached was not the outside of infinity, like I’d thought. I’d simply hit the limit of my mind’s ability to understand.
Maybe anyone who got to that point felt crazy, trying to think outside their own brain.
In my mind, I saw the circles drawn on paper shattering, breaking apart, raining down on me in bits of ink and broken curves. It reminded me of a story about how the universe was made.
“The jars are a metaphor,” I said. “I can’t believe I didn’t get that before.”
Blake shifted onto her side. I felt her watching me. She said, “Lauren, of the two of us, you’re the one I expect to make sense. What jars?”
I rolled toward her, still picturing the simple ink circles shattering around me, our faces inches apart.
“In Kabbalah there’s this teaching about how the universe was made,” I explained. “It says that God withdrew from Godself to make a space. Because before that everything was God, so God had nowhere to make the universe. After withdrawing, God had a place to make the universe. But when God tried to pour infinite light into some jars to put into the universe, they couldn’t contain it and they shattered.”
“Infinities are like that. They shatter things,” Blake said. She was grinning at me and I echoed her grin. If anyone saw us like this, they’d think we were completely out of our minds and I didn’t care.
I told her, “The broken pieces of the jars and God’s light, that’s what this world is made out of. We have to fix it because the jars broke and it’s all fucked up. But I got—listening to all that and the circles you drew—what if the breaking happened in our minds? What if the jars breaking is a metaphor about why people can’t think their way through this stuff? Because you can’t contain infinities in human brains.”
She lay back on the grass so I did too. After a bit she said, “There is no outside. The jars have to be only in our minds because that’s where you can have an idea of an outside. In the reality of the universe itself, there can never be jars. There is no outside reality. You can’t contain it like that.”
“Yeah,” I breathed out the words. “I like that. Thanks.”
She touched the edge of my palm. Her hand slid into mine, fingers interlacing, and she held tight. When she relaxed her grip, she didn’t pull away.
Whatever Blake and I were, maybe that also wasn’t a thing you could fit into jars or brains.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
After we’d been quiet for a long time, when I got done feeling like I was drinking the stars and the warm, black night sky, I tried to pull together the courage to ask Blake about the night at Bear’s parents’ house. Could I ask why she had sex with me without sounding ridiculous?
Her breathing was deep and slow. I peeked over and saw her closed eyes. She was asleep or near to it. I wanted to lie there and watch her, but that made me feel like kissing her again.
A phone buzzed.
“Get that for me?” she mumbled and rolled onto her side, her hand pulling out of mine. Eyes closed, she flipped her phone out of her front pocket and dropped it onto the grass between us.
The screen said she had six new messages from “Dad.” I picked up her phone and read a series of texts from him asking where she was and when she’d be home.
It was after midnight now. The last message said: Tell me where you are. I’ll come get you.
I texted back: This is Lauren, I’m with Blake. She fell asleep. I can drive her home, what’s the address?
The reply came a moment later, a house address and the words: Thank you.
I touched her shoulder. She didn’t move so I pushed a few times gently and said, “Hey, I have to get you home.”
“Tired,” she mumbled. “Bedtime.”
“Then let’s go to bed.”
A soft laugh. “I thought you’d never ask.”
I wanted to kiss her so badly that it burned all up the inside of my spine. So not the right time with her dad worried about her and her all bleary. Plus, if I did, I’d have to deal with Sierra about it.
“Your dad’s wondering where you are,” I said.
“Told him,” she muttered.
“You told him you were taking me to go sleep on a golf course?”
She levered up to sitting and rubbed a hand back and forth across her face. “Close enough. Told him friends.”
“Are you okay?” I asked because she seemed more tired than I would have been after napping for a few minutes in damp grass.
“Yeah, yeah, just tired really sudden. Didn’t sleep much last night, or the one before. Tried but couldn’t.”
“Math?” I asked.
“No, I was angry.”
Standing up, she wavered but I steadied her and she threw an arm around my waist. I tucked her phone into her pocket. When we got to the fence, she went through first, her movements lithe and economical.
She fell asleep again in my car. I pulled into the driveway of her house and wondered if I should wake her.
The porch light was on and a brighter light came on in the front windows. A man opened the door. He was wide and stocky with thick, dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard. I got out of the car.
“Lauren?” he asked as he came to meet me by the passenger side door. He was barefoot in worn jeans and a faded blue T-shirt.
“Yes, hi, good to meet you. Blake kind of fell asleep again in the car.”
He smiled and I could see the resonance of Blake’s grin in the way his broad cheeks bunched up.
“I’ve got her,” he said. He opened the door, crouched down and rolled her into his arms, then stood up like she weighed no more than a cat. “Can you get the front door for me?”
I went ahead and opened it, hearing Blake behind me mutter sleepily, “Hey Dad, how’d you get here?”
“I flew,” he said. “And now I’m flying you home.”
“Don’t let Lauren see your wings,” she murmured.
“I think she can handle it,” he said.
“Yeah, she’s cool.”
He went sideways through the front door and into the living room. Crouching, he slid Blake onto the couch. She snared a throw pillow, bunched it under her head, mumbled words that sounded like “aleph one” and settled back to sleep.
“Do you want anything?” her dad asked me. “I think we have Dr. Pepper or root beer.”
“Thank you, but I’m fine. I should get going.”
“Where did you two go?” he asked.
He had Blake’s nose, or I guess she had his, triangular and broad at the bottom. His skin was a few shades darker than hers, about the same as mine but with a cooler tone, olive tinged, very Blake. His eyes were a deep brown and warm, unlike my father’s calculating gaze. I wanted him to know Blake was okay, that she’d been okay all night.
“We went to a golf course,” I told him. “To look at the stars. And she was teaching me about infinities.”
“Were you able to understand it?” he asked, worried lines on his forehead.
“I think so. It was pretty great. She lost me a few times around all the rational, irrational stuff and something about the power set. I’m not a math person. But the part about orders of infinity was amazing.”
His shoulders lowered a fraction of an inch as he sighed.
“Good,” he said. “Thank you. I worry, you know. It’s what we do, parents. We worry.”
I didn’t think my father worried. Not about me. But I wasn’t going to say that. I wondered what it was like to have a dad who would come out and carry you in from the car. To have a dad who wanted to know what you’d been doing and that you were all right. If I fell asleep in my car, my father would leave me there.
“I wouldn’t let anything happen to her,” I told him.
“Do you go to her school?” he asked.
“No, I’m from Duluth, visiting. We’re in a story together. I mean, writing it and stuff.”
I didn’t know what else to say so I walked to the front door.
He said, “Thank you for bringing her home.”
I got into my car and drove down the street, turned the corner, and pulled over. I didn’t want to go back to Sierra’s. I definitely didn’t want to have to explain where I’d been. I wanted to go back to looking at the stars.
I pulled out my sketchbook and drew the circles the way I’d seen Blake do on the sheet of paper, one inside the other, with the distances between each getting bigger as they went further out.
That was important. I hadn’t understood that before. The increasing distance between one circle and the next showed that there were orders of infinity. That it wasn’t simply one thing and then another until you got to the outside. The spaces between the circles kept getting bigger until you could no longer draw them. You never got to the outside. There wasn’t any outside. You could not put the universe in jars.
I wrote down:
Pi
Transcendental
& irrational
Transfinite? What’s that?
Blake
Chapter Thirty
I had to return to Sierra’s eventually. The longer I waited the worse it was going to be. I considered driving to Duluth so that I could get out of the conversation we were going to have. But it didn’t seem safe to drive back at one in the morning.
Parked in the alley behind Sierra’s house I checked my phone. There were four texts from Sierra:
Hey baby, I’m on my way home.
Hey, I’m home, where are you?
Dustin says you went to take Blake home hours ago, where the hell are you?
Baby, I love you, don’t do this to me.
I felt like crap about that last one.
Cyd had given me a spare key, so I let myself in through the kitchen door and didn’t turn on any lights. There was enough glow from the streetlight in the alley and the moonlight coming in the east window that I could navigate through the kitchen and into the bathroom. I washed my hands and face, peed, brushed my teeth, and then I had to go deal with Sierra.
I cracked open the door to her room and saw the shape of her body under the sheet. As quietly as I could, I crossed to where my suitcase was and changed into a T-shirt. I crawled gingerly into the bed.
“Where were you?” she mumbled sleepily
“Driving around.”
“With Blake?”
“Part of the time,” I admitted. “I dropped her off at home and drove around more.”
“Did you fuck?”
“No.”
“Kiss?”
“No.”
“Good,” she said and rolled over again.
I stared at the ceiling and thought about the stars. Crazy as it was, I wanted to be back on that golf course with Blake staring up at the sky. That was the first time I could remember gazing up at the night sky and not feeling afraid. I wanted to sleep there with Blake’s hand in mine.
My breathing was all crammed up in the top of my chest like Blake said I wasn’t supposed to do. I tried to push it down, to breathe at least into the middle of my lungs but that hurt. No, I hurt.
Sierra had fallen back asleep but it was hard to lie still in the bed with her body next to me. She smelled salty and bitter. I didn’t like her smell, but most of the time I didn’t notice it under the hair products and lotions and whatnot that she wore. I did like the way her skin felt, but now I wondered if anyone’s skin would feel that way.
How wrong was it to think about sex with Blake while lying in bed with Sierra? I did anyway. They were both soft. Blake a little warmer. My body liked both of their bodies—maybe my body liked a lot of women’s bodies. That was the thing about being lesbian, right?
Sierra’s face was prettier, her eyes a more dramatic shade. People looked at her when she walked by in her purple-streaked hair and swishing dress and big boots. If you put them side by side, everyone would pay attention to Sierra, until they started talking. Then all the attention would go to Blake. She became magnetic when she opened her mouth and the ideas came tumbling out over each other.
And when we were in bed together in that basement room, Blake had looked at me. When I’d shifted away from her, she’d stopped or changed what she was doing. She paid attention to me, which at points had been too much, too intense.
I didn’t prefer being with Sierra. Those first times we were together, when she kissed me, when we had sex, I was lit up and happy. But before Blake I had nothing to compare it to. And with Blake…with Blake…
Now that I’d had sex with someone other than Sierra, I could see what was the same about both—which aspects of joy and pleasure and power were the same. Those parts had to be me since I was the common element.
I saw it like an equation (which definitely meant I’d been listening to Blake too much). If I remembered my algebra right, I should be able to remove myself from both sides of the equation. If I took out every feeling that was the same, what was left?
When I removed all of that from my relationship with Sierra, there wasn’t much. There were dinners and cuddling and movies. There was her showing me off, especially when I wasn’t in town, talking about how cute I was—and hooking up with Dustin anyway. There was me cleaning the house, buying her things, listening to her talk about her ideas and her day.
That couldn’t be right. I was doing the relationship math wrong, or maybe you weren’t supposed to use math on relationships. It was late, my eyes were heavy and sinking back into my head. In the morning it would make sense.
* * *
In the morning it didn’t make any more sense. Over breakfast I tried to get Sierra to talk to me about any subject other than what a hassle work was going to be.
“Do you think there’s an outside to the universe?” I asked.
“I liked the soap bubble thing,” she said. “Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be like?”
“But what’s around the soap bubbles?”
“A big cosmic bathtub?” she suggested, peering up from her phone and then back down at the screen where she was texting.
“Made of what?”
“Something people can’t travel through,” she said. “I’ve got to get to work. See you tonight.”
Monday night she had to run errands and asked if I wanted to come. We ended up driving around picking up a fe
w things and wandering through a mall window-shopping. When we got back to the house, I took a long bath and she got into bed. By the time I was done in the tub, she was asleep.
On Tuesday when she got back from work, she pulled me onto the couch for a makeout session, then suggested we go into her bedroom.
“Not yet,” I said. “Let’s talk. Tell me about your day.”
She shrugged. “Work and the usual. Come on, you’ve been here almost a week and I feel like I barely see you.”
“You’re seeing me now,” I said. “I want to feel like we’re more connected before we go, you know, do stuff.”
“We’re not connected?” she asked.
“It’s like there’s this distance.”
“What distance? Like the kind where you go hang out with Blake and suddenly our relationship isn’t as important to you?”
“No! That’s not it at all. We don’t really talk.”
“Maybe you’re the one not talking to me,” she said. “Have you thought of that? If you want to talk, we’ll talk. You want something to drink?”
“Pepsi?” I asked.
“I don’t think we have any, how about Mountain Dew?”
“Ugh, no. Just water.”
She came back with her beer and a glass of water for me and sat very primly on the far end of the couch. “So what do you want to talk about?”
“Did anything cool happen at work?”
“Um, no. Nothing cool ever happens at work. Well, we did get this one customer who was wearing two different tie-dyes. I almost snapped a photo.” She took a sip of her beer. “Is this the kind of talking you had in mind?”
“I guess,” I said.
I waited for a bit. She sipped her beer and looked around the room.
“It looks nice in here,” she said.
“Thanks. What do you think about the story and the whole love transcends time thing?” I asked. “I thought it was kind of schlocky.”
“Yeah, not my favorite. But whatever, Dustin does what he wants sometimes. Were you doing a finished version of that drawing of the Queen of Rogues with Zeno? We should post that.”
“It’s mostly done,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it in weeks and I couldn’t remember what state it was in, but I could probably finish it pretty quickly.
