come up with the right tools, the right methods to investigate, really investigate a hole in the universe, the doorway to a different universe, a place where a second or less is equal to seventeen of our years.” He laughed again, and nodded toward Joey, who was poised to jump off the high dive again. He looked too small to be up there alone. “The living proof of multiple universes,” Nathan said.
Ashley’s gaze drifted from Joey to the improbable blue water in the pool, the green trees nearby, borders of vivid flowers . . . She felt as if reality had undergone a shift of a magnitude she could not yet grasp. A sharp memory rose in her mind of her grandfather releasing a little fish and putting it back in a lake. “Too small,” he had said. “Not a keeper.”
Mockingbird
MY SISTER AND I ARE ON THE PORCH at our grandfather’s house. Beyond the expanse of lawn before me, the land slopes down to a lake, ringed by cattails and some brambles. It is a small lake, hardly more than a pond, blue in the sunlight, with silver streaks where the water is riffled by a breeze. On the far side is the Holt farm. Closer, butterflies and bees are giddy from nectar and pollen, hummingbirds hum. I don’t know the names of the flowers in bloom: yellows, reds, pink, too many, too untidy, a mass of blooming plants; white clover dots the lawn, birds call from the nearby oak tree. The countryside is not silent, never quiet.
I am in a low-slung chair, my sister on the swing, lazily moving back and forth. There is a squeak with each forward motion. Amidst the random music of birds and bees, the wind in leaves, the squeak is as regular, as monotonous and predictable as a metronome. I wish it would stop. I have things to think about, decisions to make, and the regularity of the squeak interferes.
My mind is a sieve. I fill it with words, with images, pages to be written, great thoughts to ponder, none of them related to the present dilemma. When I wander through the maze of myself, look again, the miracles of my mind are aswirl, as if caught in a tidepool of receding water, forever gone.
I open my dissertation, still in manuscript, and see the words as if written by another, alien to me. I nod as phrases summon concepts, the way one nods at strangers who take on familiarity when they draw near, but they are not my words; I have no claim on them. When my gaze moves on, the passed phrases leave a blank space.
Birds fill the empty space and twitter and chirp and cry raucously. Random noise, like the noise in my head. When one approaches me, I close my eyes.
The mockingbird says, “Why do you close your eyes?”
--So you won’t pluck them out.--
“Why won’t you speak to me?”
--No one talks to birds.--
“Look at me just once.”
I don’t close my eyes tighter, but I think tighter and it’s the same thing.
Across the porch my sister murmurs, “Express, address, redress, compress, repress, suppress.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What God does with trivialities.”
“Impress?”
She gives me a pitying, or possibly scornful, look. I close my manuscript and put it aside, and she continues to swing gently with her book in her lap, murmuring in a voice too low now to be intelligible. Back and forth with the jarring squeak.
“What on earth are you doing?” Irritation, exasperation, frustration: I hear them all in my own voice.
“I’m catching butterflies. They are so beautiful.”
I walk across the porch to see what she has been reading; it is a dictionary. Just that. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
“Fluorescent blue, amber and scarlet, magenta, gold . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
“The words. The beautiful words, butterflies in my net.”
Her mind is a net that catches and holds them, and mine is a sieve that lets them escape.
We both love Bobby Holt, and have loved him since we were children. He looked at us with a yearning expression, first one then the other and, in apparent confusion,