Catapult Read online

  The next day, Julie came home earlier than usual, and I put together a lunch for her that was three slices of cheese and a Popsicle on a plate. We went into the backyard so she could drip if she needed to. I noticed she had grass stains on her knees from a rough game of soccer and dried sweat under her ears. When she finished her Popsicle, she slid the whole stick in her mouth, like a knife eater, and then spat it hard across the yard. The dog took off after it.

  “My dad said not to play at the park for more than an hour, which isn’t long enough for a real game if anyone’s any good.” She looked at me suspiciously. “What are you and Noah doing with all those books, anyway? Studying for the SATs or something?”

  She arched her body backward into a bridge as she said this, and began to inch around—her face going red, her honey-brown hair whisking the grass. For a moment, she reminded me of my girls in the woods, the best ones, who refused to give the excuse of their bodies. Those girls climbed two stories up a pine tree when I told them. They hung upside down from legs like hooks.

  “It’s not schoolwork,” I said. I didn’t want her to think I was some kind of nerd, to confuse me with the kids who were always worrying about getting into a good college.

  She pulled out of her bridge and lay flat in the grass. “Well, what?”

  I decided to try the truth on her. She was back in her bridge before I said a word, and I thought, as she scuttled around with her shirt slipping over her head, she might understand. Her nipples faced me like eyes. “It’s hard to explain,” I sighed. “It’s pretty complicated, but it’s not about schoolwork. We don’t care about college. We’re working on something called a quantum tunnel.” Julie sat down on the grass, hard, and because she didn’t seem impressed at all, I added, “That’s like a time machine.”

  “Noah’s building a time machine?”

  “And I am.”

  I could tell by her posture she was wary. She was afraid I wasn’t taking her seriously, that I was mocking her because she was ten and I had nothing else to do with my time. She said, picking up a leaf and tearing it to bits, “Is that even possible?”

  “Well, it seems theoretically possible to travel,” I wasn’t supposed to use that word, “to tunnel into the future. But not the past. Nobody seems to agree about the past. But most everyone thinks you could go to the future.”

  “You’re going to the future?” The way she said this—so slowly, a piece of leaf in her mouth—I could tell she was now considering it for real. I wanted very much, then, to crouch over and whisper in her ear, to convince her. Little girls are so pliable. It would be nothing, it would be like knocking over a full glass of water, to get her to believe me.

  But then she bloomed back into her bridge and walked on her backward-facing palms over to the driveway. “Aren’t we going to the future already? What kind of time machine is that? What we already do.”

  She had a point, and I felt my fingers go stiff on my lap. Then I reminded myself: Julie never did have any real talent for making things up. “Well, the theory is it gets us there faster.” I stood up. “Spit that leaf out of your mouth, okay? That’s gross.”

  Noah began to give up hope in August. He’d been so sure we’d come to a conclusion one way or another by the end of the summer, but it seemed we were getting further and further away from a tenable theory rather than closer and closer. He kept trying to understand math that made him set his head on his book and groan. “We’ll need a course in calculus,” he moaned one afternoon. “We’ll need to go to college, maybe graduate school. I kept thinking we could just skip over derivatives, but now I think we can’t.” He lifted his head and there was a welt on his cheek from where the book’s staircase of pages had marked him.

  We ate cereal and watched the dog pee under the deck because it was raining. “Where’s Julie?” Noah wondered, looking worried for once, as if she had just occurred to him for the first time all summer. We went and stood in the open threshold of the sliding glass door, where we could feel the displacement of air from the rain.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s your sister.”

  Anything could wound him. Which was one of the reasons I loved him, I guess, and why I knew I would stick around for longer than made sense, maybe marry him. He sat down morosely on the planks of the stairs, let the rain drench him.

  I said—sorry now, soothing him—“You’re getting soaked. Come back inside.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You look like a bad movie, seriously. There should be music so we can just sit and watch you and feel sad.”

  He started humming a song I didn’t know, then stopped. “You know what?” He laughed in a way that didn’t sound like laughing. “My parents think we’re doing it.” He rubbed the rain off the face of his watch and gave it a heartbreaking look.

  Right on cue, the phone started ringing. Between each ring, the silence went on and on, and I was sure, each time, that that was the end. And then, each time, it rang again.

  “Doing it?” I laughed at his wording. “What in the world makes them think that?”

  He stood up. “Let’s go inside. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Neither did I. We lay damply in his bed in silence. No small talk, for once, and no planning. At first I found the silence inordinately exciting. We lay naked on our backs without touching, and my knees felt welded together with sweat. Without any talk to distract us, even my breathing felt enormous, wicked enough to disturb the bed as air went in and out of my chest. It occurred to me in a way it never had before that if he looked over at me, even once, he would see everything. I breathed, and held my breath. Breathed.

  But then I realized Noah was only silent because he was depressed. I felt his misery moving off him in immobilizing waves.

  “Noah,” I said. “We could build another raft. We could do something else.”

  “It’s not that. I don’t care if we build anything. I just want to know whether it’s possible, you know? So we haven’t wasted all this time on nothing. It doesn’t have to actually happen.”

  The phone started up again, and between each ring, I waited.

  But neither of us got out of bed.

  After a moment, I took his hand and starting talking. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was telling stories, bullshitting, making things up, but mostly I was just hoping Noah would shift his shoulder into my breast and pretend it hadn’t happened. I was hoping if I talked long enough about something else, we could pretend I wasn’t taking his dick in my hand like an animal I’d caught by simply bending down and opening up my fingers.

  There would be no time machine, of course, but we didn’t say that.

  I never told Noah about my girls in the woods, though I wish I had. They hung upside down from branches, and I watched their heads fill up, one by one, with blood. I stood on the ground and let them dangle. “I’m sick,” some of them pleaded. “Let me come down.” And I did. But the best ones stayed and were bats, vampires. They crossed their wrists over their chests, and they didn’t fall. They said they would fall, they said their legs were getting tired. They said there was a ringing in their ears (a music, I told them, a song for crisis), but they just kept on shining in the tree like Christmas decorations. Human flags. I didn’t tell Noah, but if I had, I would have explained that they didn’t fall, not one of them.

  The strange thing about that woods when I think back on it is that it was just Mr. Ferter’s untended backyard, with rolls of chicken wire beneath buckthorn and a bunch of rusty lawnmowers. I remember I had a stick that was twice as tall as I was. I hoisted it over my head—majestically, I felt—and in this way, I could touch those beet-red dangling hands (the ones who couldn’t keep them crossed over their chests) and stir all that brackish hair. I could tap the bug-eyed nipples on their chests when they let their arms go and their shirts bunched up around their armpits. Even now I remember how good that felt. I felt everything as if the twigged point of the stick were my own fingertip, which was
precise but so unwieldy as well, so tricky to manage. Nobody ever really appreciated that. The skill.

  Just before school started, Noah’s parents started making him go in twice a week for private talks with his minister. The first thing this minister did was forbid him to be alone in the house with his girlfriend. This wasn’t much of an obstacle, though, because Noah could say with complete truthfulness that he and I had never even discussed having any kind of romantic relationship. Later, his minister revised his earlier recommendation and warned Noah not to spend time alone at home with a girl who did not share his moral values and his most sacred beliefs. “I told him we have lots of projects together, but he said I won’t find peace.” Noah looked hunched over and old when he told me. In keeping with the minister’s rules, we were sitting in his driveway. “He said I will never be happy that way.”

  “Are you happy now?” We had the catapult out and had rigged up a system that smashed Lego man straight into the cement.

  I shouldn’t have asked it. The dog came out of the garden and scooped up Lego man with his mouth. Noah clapped his hands and ran after him. “Leave it!” he howled. He pried open the dog’s face and wrenched Lego man free from its jaws. “Bad dog. Shame.”

  He came back, set a glistening Lego man in his Dixie cup, and I wondered then what it was like to be a real Christian, to live inside that shut box, to live with all those corners and walls, and way up at the top, just one little shuttered window.

  “Noah,” I said to him. “What would happen if we could go to the future? Just skip over all this, and, ta-da, be twenty-four or sixty-two?”

  He was a child now. He was a boy throwing rocks at a dog. He didn’t want to play this game. “I don’t know.”

  I tried another tack. “Or what if you were, like, born without limbs. Without arms and without legs. Could you be content?”

  “That doesn’t make sense.” But he sat down to think about it. He pulled the lever and sent Lego man skidding across the cement on his chest. “Maybe. Maybe in certain circumstances.”

  “Or what if a meteor came and scraped Earth from the solar system? Whack. Would God be sad?”

  “He would and he wouldn’t. The earth is just an idea that God has, I think. A thought in His mind, which can’t actually be—”

  “Be?”

  “I’m trying to think of the word. Changed. Damaged.”

  The dog skidded out from behind a bush, scooped up Lego man in his mouth, and ran off toward the creek. It was strange how satisfying that was, how glad I was to be done, finally, with the catapult game, and I told Noah in a rush that I was willing to believe the possibility that God existed.

  He shook his head. “You don’t believe in God.”

  “Sure, I do,” I said as an experiment. I imagined the face I’d have to wear as a Christian, the knowing half smile that you see in Jesus pictures, as if swallowing something dangerous without moving your lips. I thought, if I tried, I could learn to play the piano and be a generous but talented Scrabble player. I could have better posture. I’d convinced people of far stranger things. I had been one-legged, lame, a beetle, a murderer. I’d made children into bats.

  He could have tested me. He could have pursued it so much further than that. But that was enough for him. “Come on,” he said, standing up. “I’m hungry.”

  Inside we stirred cereal in cloudy milk and tossed the last soggy pieces to the dog. Then we lay the wrong way in Noah’s bed, our heads hanging off one end and our feet hanging off the other. Over us, the people in the ceiling paint seemed unable to close their mouths; I could feel the ache that was the ache of their faces. Noah wanted to talk about timetables for the universe, but I had decided to act the good Christian—to be better, so much better than he was at this—and I wouldn’t let him touch me, even by accident. We were naked, as usual, but I kept my body out of reach.

  When he put his hand on my breast, I said, innocent as Adam’s dust, “What are you doing, Noah?”

  He barely blinked. He took his hand back and said, “Okay, here’s the thing. I know it seems like a dead end, but I’ve been considering cosmological horizons as an important part of the Big Bang space-time, which undermines our understanding of what can be observed in the past. As well as, I guess, our ability to influence future events.”

  “Stop that,” I said, playing Good. I sounded uncertain, I thought, which was an acceptable way for a Good Christian to sound, given the circumstances.

  He thumbed my nipple just once, so I said—as if sad, as if completely worn down—“Noah? Do you want to have sex?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “No,” he finally said. “All I’m trying to say is that—” He lifted his head up, took a breath, and when he spoke again he was whining. “I want to go back to what I was saying.”

  He put the backs of his hands over his eyes, dug his knuckles in. Our heads were still hanging off the bed, and I saw that his face had long ago filled with blood, a flush that made the veins in his forehead visible. Close as I was, I could see a dozen or more tiny lines, like cracks, all purple and branching scalpward.

  That’s when my plan changed slightly. That’s when I saw that what we did and what we said were two different things, two sides of a wheel that went around and around and would never meet. So I took his dick in my hand and I squeezed it, gently, in rhythm with his words, which meant nothing. He seemed to like that. Then for a moment his words were the important part—he was describing the transparent nature of the universe after its opaque start—and what I did with my hand was completely insignificant, far too trivial for notice, something children did because they hadn’t yet learned any better. “No, wait,” he said once, but by then the wheel had gone around again and I wasn’t listening to him anymore. I sat up, the world swinging to black as blood rushed from my head, and I climbed on top of him. I felt something like a stripe of pain painted down my gut, that’s all. He jerked away once and gave in. He wouldn’t look at me then, and I must have been crying because a strand of snot dangled from my nose. I leaned down over him to wipe it off. I meant to tell him when we were done with this, Listen, when we’re done with this, we could say whatever we wanted. We could say I was a Christian. We could say he was a virgin. We could go back to the past. But then the phone started ringing, and instead of saying this out loud, I crouched there over him, awkwardly, holding my dripping nose, waiting for the ringing to stop.

  ONE YOU RUN FROM, THE OTHER YOU FIGHT

  Nora sat on the balcony after dinner and wrote out checks. “It’ll be easy,” Sage promised. “We’ll zip around and eat cheeses.” But Nora felt a flush of dread. She didn’t like these events, the ritual fawning over other people’s children.

  It was late spring and the mosquitoes were descending. One landed on her arm, and Nora watched it part the fine hairs and look around. It had a face like an important utensil.

  “Whinnie McPhire!” Sage cried, reading the name off the invitation. “What can you possibly say to a teenager named that?”

  Whinnie McPhire lived in the nice part of town where the trees were a hundred years old and, therefore, diseased. In front of the house there was a white oak with a tire swing and a bulbous growth like an engorged doorknob. A bluish dog ran to the curb and stopped abruptly, spinning idiot circles on its hind legs. Nora stooped and put her hand out, but Sage said, “It’s an electric fence. One more step and bzzzt!”

  He giggled. Sage was scornful of money, thought himself better than their friends who sought it, and loved an opportunity to deride them. He couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. He said, “Ready for Miss Class of 2009?”

  Inside, they were ushered straight from the door to the food: card tables draped in green plastic and folds of turkey on trays. There was a blown-up portrait of the graduate hanging from the ceiling, her blonde head floating over the olives. Nora looked for the girl’s mother, an old friend from college, but she was nowhere around. Everyone stood with green paper plates and plastic knives, eating and tal
king and touching their teeth for seeds. A man near the cheese dip asked Nora and Sage how long they’d been together. Sage clapped the man’s arm. He said, “Old man, too long, too long,” and the man, not understanding Sage’s tone, laughed with him. The man said, “I hear divorce can do great things for a marriage!”

  Nora pulled the pit of an olive from her mouth. “We’re not married.”

  They got lost on their way to the second one, Nora driving, Sage telling her to count the blocks. “It’s a grid,” he said. “It goes either up or down.” They found it because there was a rented rickshaw outside, teenage boys with long dyed hair dragging teenage girls. This one had a Chinese theme, with paper lanterns and cream cheese puffs. Inexplicably, the graduate wore a bow tie and a top hat. “He’s artsy,” a little woman whispered to Nora, as the graduate did a spinning trick with his cane. Everyone applauded, and then his mother and father climbed into a dragon costume, one at the head and one at the tail.

  In the car again, Sage kissed her. “I thought I was going to have to take that thing by the nose and guide it into traffic.” He rolled his window down and draped his hand out, humming. He was thrilled. Nora let the car move under her. They’d been together for nine years, and she knew how much of their relationship depended on shared contempt. Pity the sellouts. Pity the spoiled children, the lonely husbands and nervous wives. Nora and Sage held part-time teaching jobs and kept themselves respectable.

  “It’s beautiful out here,” Nora said, “isn’t it?” They were driving into the part of the suburb where a few old farms remained, wedged between the subdivisions.