Catapult Page 3

  “I’m not mad,” I told him, furious. In fact, I didn’t care one way or the other about the moon. I just wanted to seem smart. But Noah could always make any rhetorical victory of mine seem, at the last moment, unrelated to the real argument.

  Our pattern was fixed when we got to his house. We each ate a bowl of Cheerios in silence, and then we went to his room where we took off our clothes, very careful not to mention—or even affect to notice—that this was what was happening. “Is this a new CD?” I’d ask. “Is that your sister’s pen?” Once under the covers, we’d start discussing his theories again—ornaments versus necessities, a mooned versus a moonless world—and every time we touched it was as if by some extreme accident of circumstance. “Whoops!” Noah said once, as if he’d dropped a glass. A sprinkler blatted water against the window. There was a hand on my butt, a stuffed dog under my head, a face-shaped swirl of paint on the ceiling. Time crinkled up, got sticky. I can’t remember what we talked about then. All I can remember is my arm going numb under the weight of his head, the leaking-sand sensation of blood leaving my fingers. I remember the click click of saliva breaking in his throat as he murmured in my ear. Then, after a while, Noah would get another idea—a bigger catapult, a tauter spring, a weapon we could build on wheels—and we’d dress in a rush, grateful to be done with the strained, shameful drudgery of coming up with things to say.

  He wasn’t a vampire, of course, but a Christian, a good one, so the third catapult we built was a raft. We just kept adding things and taking things off, until it was flat and huge and ready for water. Noah’s parents weren’t sure they approved of this, so before we tried it out they invited me to play Scrabble. They were white-haired, tall, and looming people. Their white hair was incongruous with their faces, which were unlined and playful, almost girlish. They kept tickling each other as Noah distributed the wooden letters. Noah’s little sister, Julie, arranged her pieces furtively under the coffee table. In my corner of the couch, I smoldered in the premature humiliation of defeat. I could feel my brain rising up in a slow, inevitable panic; before I knew it, the letters were too far away to be legible. I couldn’t make out a word.

  “Your turn,” Noah’s father said.

  They watched me. It occurred to me then how bad my posture was, my spine a curled hook. I had a crop of pimples on my forehead and a long purple bruise on my arm from shoving my brother in a closet and forcing shut the door. I was still holding out hope that my body could go back to being what it was a year ago, effortless and completely forgettable, but that was starting to seem less and less likely. I tried to concentrate, but I didn’t like how Noah’s family was looking at me so long, hoping so hard that I was sweet and harmless and possibly Christian.

  As they waited for me to finish my turn, Julie stood up and played a few bars of Bach on the baby grand piano. As she played with one hand, she leaned over to pet the dog with the other. “Dum, da-dum,” she said.

  “CERT,” Noah’s mother said to me, when I put my letters down. “Now, that’s fine. Close enough, don’t we think—” She looked around the room. “—to a real word.”

  Halfway through the game, Noah’s father jumped up and said he had a book for me to borrow. He ran upstairs and bounded back down, setting the thing on my lap. He was an accountant, Noah had said, but his firm had let him go a few months back, and he’d since been spending a lot of time at the downtown library. “Just read the first page,” he said. On the cover were rays of sun behind a man with outstretched arms. “Just read the first chapter.”

  “Here?” I asked.

  “Just a few pages. There you go.”

  Now, sometimes, I think I can see the whole line of events that got me out of childhood—no event more or less important than the rest, just sequence, time doing its march—but then, I was always on a precipice. I was always balking. For instance, when Noah’s father said, “Go ahead, read it,” I felt his excitement like a menace, and I considered refusing. Why be what they wanted? Why read what he said? But I knew as well as anyone how to look like I was good, so I took the book and smiled it down.

  An hour or so later, after the ice cream had been served and my dad had been called, Noah’s father asked, “Did you make it to the end? What did you think?”

  “Not quite. That man in the desert—”

  “He wasn’t exactly a man.”

  “The angel in the desert—”

  “Katie, do you believe in God?”

  I refused to meet his hopeful gaze. Instead, I fixed my eyes on the abandoned Scrabble board with its rows and columns of letters, and it seemed sad to me then, almost pathetic, that so much time should be wasted on words that told no message and made no story. It was all just points.

  “Sometimes, maybe,” I said, because Noah’s father was waiting for an answer and there wasn’t any other way out. But I sliced my words down the middle into two equal pieces. The meaning said, “Maybe,” and the tone said this: “A nice person would fuck off, and you, I guess, are not a nice person.”

  The raft we built was wonderful, a great big flying saucer of plywood and two-by-fours, which we fastened together with screws and nails and set in the creek. It was high summer by then, and we knew we could float for miles before the creek hit the waterfall and fell, near Fort Snelling, into the Mississippi. We floated lazily through the suburban backyards of the city, startling children on their swing sets and fathers at their smoky grills. We used canoe paddles to get us through the rapids. Once, we were overtaken by a swarm of sleek plastic kayaks that shot like bullets through the water. In our raft, we sat cross-legged on life jackets, let the currents curl us around and around. We were happy. We got stuck in cattails and tree roots. When the creek widened out, we lay on our backs and let the sun burn us. We were past sunscreen—we were way past all that. We floated feet-first under low-hanging bridges, through golf courses and under highways, past the penitentiary with its barbed-wire coils. The prisoners playing basketball were surprised to see us, and one of them rushed the fence and pretended to climb it, as if we could help row him an escape from jail. “No! Stay there!” Noah waved him down, laughing. “We’ll come back! We’ll come back for you later!”

  Once, a red-winged blackbird dropped onto Noah’s cap, balanced there for a moment, and then seemed to slide through the air onto a nearby cattail.

  Once, a boy barreling down the creek path on a skateboard raced us to the next bridge, then spat a wad of gum that landed on my paddle. The gum clung to the wood like a gray, wrinkly leech. “Grow up!” Noah yelled at him, and the boy, who was maybe twelve, said, “I’m not the one on a shitty old board in the creek. You grow up!”

  Late in the day my dad showed up, waving at us as we floated under a bicycle-path bridge near Lake Nokomis. He didn’t say anything. He just stood with one hand in the air until we waved back, and then he set both hands on the railing and watched as we were sucked out of sight in the current under the bridge.

  “What’s he doing here?” Noah whispered as we ducked under the wood planks. “How’d he find us?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back. “I told him we’d be on the creek today. He’s probably just checking in, making sure we haven’t drowned.”

  Overhead, my father was wheeling his three-speed bike across the bridge and back to the road. I could hear the low rumbling of the planks, the creaking adjustments and readjustments to his weight. I hoped he’d just go home. I knew he worried about me—for years, I’d spent too much time in the woods, watched too little TV—but I thought he seemed reassured now that I was spending so many of my days with Noah. A teenage girl with a boyfriend is, if nothing else, normal.

  Noah lifted his paddle up and thudded it against a concrete piling. “He’s checking in with you, you mean.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “He doesn’t trust me. He thinks I’m making you into a Christian or something.”

  I rolled my eyes. “He doesn’t even know you’re a Christian.”

/>   He paused, put his paddle on his lap. “Why not?”

  “What do you mean, why not?”

  When Noah was annoyed, he would smooth his voice down flat. No landmarks, no intonation. “You know what I mean. Are you embarrassed by it or something? You know what I mean.”

  Did I? Here again was the old temptation: the desire to prove something to him, to win, which would be the same as losing a different, more obscure argument. But I couldn’t help myself. I did in fact know what he meant, or thought I did, and I wanted him to feel bad for speaking to me as if we weren’t on the raft—as if we were still in his house, or in his bed. I felt betrayed. “It’s not important to me,” I said, as the raft surged through the water and spit us out into the light. “I don’t care about it at all. I never think about it, that’s why I didn’t tell my dad. Who cares?”

  After the raft sank and couldn’t be repaired, we sat around for a few days with his sister at the park. Julie was a burgeoning athlete. She always had a tennis racket or a baseball bat, a muscle set that needed toning. Sometimes we could talk the neighborhood boys into letting her in a soccer game, and then we’d go back to Noah’s empty house and draw up plans for our time machine. By July, Noah’s bed was hot, a wrinkled coil of sheets that kept us turning from our bellies to our backs, from our backs to our bellies. We moved like stones in waves, like sunbathers. We didn’t call it a time machine, of course. The title we put on the tab of our manila folder after we got dressed was: A Hypothesis for Quantum Tunneling. What I liked best was the library where we went after lunch because it was air-conditioned and mostly empty, just mothers with mottled babies in slings and sleeping homeless people. The books we read had been read by someone else, someone who folded the pages down and wrote in pencil little marginal notes like, the problem of the grandfather paradox. “I don’t know if this guy understood any of this,” Noah said, excited. As he read, he scraped curled bits of wood from his pencil tip with a fingernail. “There’s a whole fourth dimension you can’t see with anything but math.”

  For Noah, this made the time machine better than the catapult or the raft. It was so much more inviolable and ambitious.

  He forbade me from using the run-of-the-mill language of “moving” or “traveling” in time, and instead insisted on talking exclusively of world lines and closed time-like curves, in which, Noah said, an event can be simultaneous with its cause, and may be able to cause itself. “This is something most people don’t think about at all,” Noah pointed out. It was hard for me to tell how serious Noah really was about this project. Sometimes it seemed as though we were mocking the people who believed this stuff, like the guy with the marginal note that said place - time = memory - mind. (“How lame,” Noah said. “How completely dumb.”) And other times it seemed we were mocking them because they didn’t believe it enough—weren’t determined and talented enough to take it seriously.

  One afternoon, I talked Noah into checking out our books from the library and walking to the 7-Eleven. We sat on the sidewalk outside, stabbing tunnels in red slush with our straws. “Can I have a sip of yours?” I asked. I wanted to put my mouth where Noah’s mouth was, I wanted him to see my throat working.

  But he was already standing up.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “You want to hear what I’m thinking about?”

  I didn’t really. I was getting a little bored of relativity, and so I dawdled as we crossed the street, let a car get too close and honk at me. I gave the driver—a pregnant lady rubbing her belly—the finger. Her expression was unruffled, almost smug, as if she expected this from me, as if I was just some punk teenager like all the others. Then I wanted to hold up my book, General Relativity in the Age of Allegory, in my defense. I wanted to show her what her bullied, ordinary mind could not begin to comprehend. I wanted to make time twist into a miraculous disastrous tunnel and take its own tail in its mouth—ouroboros, wormy Death Hole, formula for stasis, the nourishment of God—but the instant the words appeared, then disappeared, from my head, I tucked the book under my arm so she couldn’t see it as she passed. “Come on,” Noah called, but I was incensed at him suddenly and shouted back, “Did you even look for traffic before you stepped into the road? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  He gave me a look like I’d kicked him.

  For the moment, I didn’t care about hurting him. The problem was it was getting harder for me to tell if I was far, far ahead of everyone else—or somehow behind other kids my age, the ones who spent their days at the pool and at Taco Bell.

  I grew ashamed, a little secretive. One night, Ashley Leber from across the street called to ask if I could take over a babysitting job. When I made an excuse about being too busy, she said she’d heard I built a boat with Noah and took it to the creek—“Noah’s Ark,” she called it. “Are you still dating that Evangelical freak?” she asked. “Excuse my language.”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  “Not that you’d be a freak for dating him. He’s hot.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

  The thing was, I used to spend a lot of time with those girls, Ashley and her friends, who lived on my block. There were summers when we basically lived in our backyards, scrambling over the chain link fences. Now those same girls rode their ten-speed bikes down the sidewalks to the mall, where they ate samples of frozen yogurt from doll-sized spoons. “You can eat as much as you want,” Ashley told me from her bike one day, “and it’s all free, and you don’t get fat.”

  At some point in the last year, they’d started treating me with an evasive respect, like someone’s frail grandma. Like someone who’d taken care of them once, and now was to be humored. It was true, in a way. When we were eleven, twelve, I’d taken care of them all. Summer evenings, I used to usher them into the woods to play in the stand of old pines behind our houses. In the deep shade of the trees, I’d quieted them down. I’d taken their shoes from them, and I’d taken their socks. I’d made their wimpy girl fantasies into categorical facts. I told them where to stand, how to walk, how to do the stories. Look, the club-footed horse thief made you lame so you’d have to make love to him. Limp, limp. Look, the limping princess tried to escape on a horse stolen from the thief’s stable. You, gallop. You, stop. Put your heart into it. I don’t remember Ashley, in particular, being there with us. There were only believers and doubters: I saw no other distinctions, considered none of them friends. You either believed what the mind could do—and took your severed horse hoof and found what solace there was—or you didn’t, and were a kid. I had no patience for pretenders, for people who needed shoes or snacks. I converted them all. They loved me because I was the only one who could get them through it, past their own marginal, limited minds, which required so many little suicides, so much constant sacrifice, surrender after surrender.

  So when Ashley rolled up that day on her bike, I could honestly say I didn’t feel anything for her. She was nobody. A girl with a plastic hair-clip in her mouth, like a bit. Junior high had changed everything between us. I didn’t need her to stop her bike and ask me with such strained deference to come along, as if I’d ever needed something from her. “There’s a flavor with gum in it,” she said to me, still hesitating at my driveway.

  “Okay,” I said. But when she started a smile by pulling her hair by the roots into a ponytail, I added, “I’ve got stuff to do though. This project I’m working on.”

  She shrugged and made a lopsided ponytail with one hand. Rode on.

  The project was going poorly, however. Noah’s parents got worried that we were spending too much time alone, so they started calling him during the day when they were gone. By late July they were taking turns, calling every hour, on the hour. His mother called from her desk at church and his father called from gas stations where he lunched on hotdogs. He was meeting contacts in the field, Noah said, looking for a job that let him be himself, which, I guess, meant not getting punished for speculating about angels. In the kitchen, Noah woul
d wind the phone cord around his neck, like a noose, and politely reassure him. “Julie’s at the neighbor’s. She’s fine. I’m fine. The house keeps on not burning down.”

  More and more now, we stayed at the table with our books after cereal. Noah was getting impatient with our progress on a propulsion system for time dilation. He seemed harried by the numbers, stressed out. He didn’t have time for taking the dog out, so I did that, and other chores too, like filling the dishwasher. At the table, Noah took notes on his father’s legal pads, and when there was nothing else for me to do, I made doodles next to his notes. I drew rafts and vessels and boats, anything that could float away.

  Once, the phone rang when Noah was in the middle of a troubling equation. He had his head in both hands, and I could see him squeezing his skull, the blue veins riding over his knuckles. His veins were like a second, more complicated hand that lived inside the ordinary one. He groaned. “Answer that, please? I’m working on something.”

  I stood up at once, feeling the complete uselessness of my limbs, which I could not arrange in a tidy, concentrated hunch over math the way Noah did. I was always crouching in my chair, pulling out a single strand of hair and setting it adrift in the sunshine with the dust.

  “Well!” It was Noah’s dad on the phone. He sounded startled, as if someone had come up from behind and said boo. “It’s nice to get you on the phone, Katie. What are you up to today?”

  “Not much.”

  “Okay. Well. Listen.” He had nothing else to say, and in the wake of his last word I heard him change the phone to his other ear. I could actually hear his stubble scrape against the mouthpiece.

  “Is there something I should tell Noah?”

  “Tell him I’ll be home at six?” He made it into a question. What he really wanted to know was something else, something only I could tell him.

  But I felt no responsibility to reassure Noah’s dad, who hadn’t let me go home until I’d skimmed through his whole book about a man who walked barefoot across the Sahara, who lay down and almost died of dehydration, and then got back up again when an angel arrived on a cloud. That man was a moron, a liar. His story wasn’t convincing at all. “No problem!” I told Noah’s dad now, egging him on a little because I knew I could. “I’ll let Noah know. He’s waiting for me, so I should get back to him. You won’t be here for, what, like another five hours? No worries! We’ll figure out something to do until Julie gets home.”