All the Water in the World Page 9

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “Oh my god. It looks exactly like you. Exactly. Maddy, you are such a good artist. Isn’t she, Vic?”

  Vicky turned around, both eyes winged now. “Whoa,” she said. “I could never do that. Not in a million years.” People who look out for themselves don’t mind giving praise.

  “You’ve never tried,” I said, to be generous back.

  Fiona was flipping through the pages. She came to the half-finished sketches of Cloud. “This is cool. Squint your eyes and look from one to the other.”

  “It’s like she’s moving on the page,” said Vicky.

  “Alive, almost.”

  Maddy,

  Sorry I have gone quiet. I have been busy and also taking time to think. This is a complicated situation for everyone, ¿no estás de acuerdo? If you still want to keep writing I guess I am okay with it for now. I will try to answer any questions you have.

  Antonio

  Eve

  11

  Norma reached up to tighten her ponytail and I thought she shuddered a little in the heat. I’d ended up telling her the story of the snake without exactly deciding to.

  “I told Maddy when she was old enough.”

  “What did she make of it?”

  “Oh, even as a child, Maddy liked the . . . Gothic, shall we say. She never shied away from frightening things. She wanted to know what was out there, I guess.”

  “Is she still like that?”

  I steepled my fingers. “Oh, yes.”

  “Mine are scaredy-cats,” said Norma. “Maybe they’ll toughen up when they’re teenagers. Isn’t that when kids get into horror movies and gore and whatnot?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “It’s strange. I haven’t thought about that snake in years.”

  I could not read Norma’s silence, so I pointed out the family of ducks that every day made their way from the peninsula to the fallen tree on the lot next door. They proceeded with a mechanical, jaunty confidence, as if protection of the young is a matter of getting everyone in the correct position. We followed the ducks’ progress until they disappeared one at a time through the gap under the trunk.

  “Do we actually hear those ducks swimming,” I said, “or do we only think we hear them?” Sound or imagined sound: the distinction is not as great as one might think. What I imagine is also part of the world.

  Norma cocked her head. “I don’t think I can hear them.”

  I considered this a very cryptic reply. “Even if they’re too far away to hear, we invent the sounds.” Nearby, in the shadows of the overhanging branches, bronze shafts of light plummeted down. “Maddy tells me there are three worlds in a lake. The surface texture. The mud, weeds, and rocks underneath. And the reflection. The trick, she says, is to hold all three worlds in your mind at once.”

  Norma nodded in an encouraging way that made me suspicious. Why had she stayed this long, gamely listening to my nonsense about lakes, snakes, and turtles? She laced her fingers and straightened her arms, palms out, a gesture often accompanied by a yawn. Any minute she would stand and make her excuses, lower herself into the kayak as clumsily as she had disembarked, and paddle back to her life.

  The dock trembled underfoot. I turned. Robin was standing by the moored boat.

  “I’ve got to go,” said Norma, rising from her chair.

  “No, no!” he protested. “I don’t want to break anything up. Just came to say hello.” He was looking back and forth between us, smiling a little, trying to gauge the moment. “You’re from across the way?”

  “New kid on the block. Norma,” she said, extending her hand. They looked comically mismatched. Norma was from fair, big-boned, northern stock, while Robin, who had a Greek grandfather, was slight of build and deeply tanned.

  “Eve says you’re making a new room in the attic?”

  He showed her his stained palms.

  “You’ve hurt yourself,” I said, moving closer to touch his knuckle. I’d always thought Robin’s shyness was visible only to me, but maybe it was plain to everyone.

  “I’m afraid there’s a long way to go.” He returned his hand to his pocket.

  “My husband’s an optimist when it comes to remodeling,” said Norma. “My personal rule of thumb is to estimate how long it will take and multiply by four.”

  “That’s about right.” Robin laughed. “We’ll get there in the end. Come in and see what we’re doing sometime.” The two of them had warmed to one another, I could tell.

  “And you come over to ours,” said Norma, kneeling to untie her kayak. “I’m dying to get to know people.”

  Together we watched her plunge in and set the thing rocking. Robin held the mooring rope until she had arranged her legs, and she shoved the dock away with her paddle and raised it to wave, like someone who was convinced that the world was a magnificent place and we were all lucky to be here.

  Maddy

  12

  I still had a moment of amazement, when opening the front door, that a teacher was coming to my house. She wore her tan belted raincoat and large-framed glasses, and carried her cloth tote bag. I’ve missed so much school that the only hope of me going into junior year is to continue with the home tutoring. Even then, I might have to repeat a year. It depends.

  “Do you know we’ve raised four hundred dollars selling your cards?” said Miss Sedge once we were downstairs. She was there to get me through biology, but the campaign was taking more and more of our time. She had a gruff way of speaking, like there were stones in her mouth she had to talk around. I hardly noticed anymore; it was just part of her, like brown was the color of her hair. If you’d told me a year ago that I would admire Miss Sedge and look forward to her visits, I would not have believed you. I guess if you’d told me a lot of things a year ago, I would not have believed you.

  On her laptop was the image Jack and I had Photoshopped of the White House underwater. We’d named it The Picture Postcard Zone. “It’s a fabulous image. We’ll definitely use it on the posters. And signs on the day.”

  “It was my idea,” I reminded her, though Jack had already given me the credit.

  “I know it was. You’re a star. You both are. Now we need to think of something else. Something to go with the speeches. I don’t know exactly what.”

  The doorbell rang. I jumped a mile. She pretended not to notice. I had made sure she arrived first because I wanted us to be deep in conversation when Jack got there so that he would be the odd one out. I wanted him to see I was someone to be reckoned with, even if I didn’t know what to do when a boy grabbed me out of the blue and then forgot to kiss me.

  I heard Jack talking to my mother in the hall, and my mother directing him down. I had resolved to be looking elsewhere, but my eyes had a mind of their own. He joined us at the table, booted up his computer, and opened a blank document. I took it as a good sign that he could hardly look at me.

  “Let’s brainstorm,” he said, as if we’d been waiting for him to come along and save the day.

  “You can’t say brainstorm anymore.”

  “You can’t?”

  “It’s insulting to people with epilepsy.”

  “Ha!” said Miss Sedge. “If I had epilepsy, I’d find it insulting to be patronized like that.”

  She was not one for correctness, political or any other kind. True, she was an overly strict hall monitor, but Jack said that was to keep on the right side of the school authorities. They didn’t like the fact that she’d gotten herself arrested in the last campaign.

  “Is this even legal?” I asked.

  “Is what legal?” she said.

  “Inciting minors to activism and civil disobedience,” said Jack.

  “Is it legal to destroy the earth we all live on? Is it legal to poison the atmosphere? Is it legal to melt the polar ice caps?”

  “It’s probably legal—” Jack began.

  “Who cares?” I jumped in to cut off his technical point. “Change the laws.”

  Miss Sedge g
ave a throaty, approving laugh. “Precisely. You can’t do the civil disobedience part, but you can work behind the scenes and go on the march. It’s you young people who should be up in arms. It’s your world.” Under her breath she added: “My ambition at that school is to resign before I get fired.” I liked the way she answered questions by not exactly answering them.

  “What could we make?”

  Jack said what about a video montage of melting icebergs? I said too obvious. What about a hot-air balloon slowly bursting? He wasn’t sure. A cartoon? A song? Busily he recorded all the ideas, darting glances at me now and then but keeping his eyes mostly on Miss Sedge. She was younger than she looked at first, not much older than my mother. Would I change places with her? To be sitting in some high school girl’s family room chatting about my favorite subject? To be a person for whom Jack was just another smart sixteen-year-old boy?

  We went over the list. The hot-air balloon was too literal, a cartoon too glib.

  “Not a song . . .” I made my goofball face. “A song would be so extra.”

  “Less is more,” said Jack.

  “Whatever that means.”

  Miss Sedge leaned back in her chair. Unsettling as her silence could be, we could trust what she said because she never tried to flatter us.

  “The structure of the benzene ring was solved by a dream. The problem had been preoccupying Kekule for a long time. Then one afternoon he fell asleep and dreamed of a snake biting its own tail.”

  Were we doing a science lesson now? Jack and I exchanged a tiny shrug.

  “Though there’s no proof,” she went on, “he ever had the dream. His accounts of it over the years were inconsistent.”

  “Then why believe it?” said Jack.

  “Consistency is overrated,” said Miss Sedge. “Einstein would listen to music when he came to a dead end in his thinking. He said that usually did the trick. Alvarez was studying something else—magnetism—in the geological record when he figured out what happened to the dinosaurs. He and his father came up with the idea that the earth was hit by an asteroid.”

  “Funny,” I said. “My friend Vicky was talking about asteroids. Is it true one is going to hit us?”

  “Sometime in the next two millennia. It could be a hit or a near miss.” Miss Sedge removed her glasses, rubbed her eyes, put the glasses back on. “There are competing theories, of course, about the dinosaurs. What I mean to say is, solutions often come from outside the domain of the problem.”

  “Thinking outside the box,” said Jack. “Blue-sky thinking.”

  “If you want to go for the clichés.”

  “Well, what would you call it?” I asked, feeling sorry for Jack, though I agreed his cliché habit let him down.

  “I’d call it ‘creative thinking.’ I’d call it ‘roundabout thinking.’ I’d call it ‘making use of all of our talents,’ including ones we aren’t in control of. Velcro!” Jack laughed and I laughed. “An engineer was hunting in the Alps and noticed his clothes covered with cockleburs. He found they had tiny hooks that stick to the loops in fabric. Voilà! If you go straight for an answer, you get something you already know. If you go the crooked back way, you have a chance of getting something more interesting.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” Jack didn’t like being in the dark about anything.

  “Well, what are you preoccupied with these days?” Miss Sedge was addressing both of us, but I got the feeling she was really talking to me. “What do you wake up thinking about? What’s important to you?”

  Jack leaned forward, eager to speak.

  “And don’t tell me what you think I want to hear.”

  Now was my chance. I went upstairs, got my sketchbook, and handed it over without a word. Miss Sedge said nothing. First she held each page an arm’s length away, then she removed her glasses for a close-up. She examined the shirt, the incomplete versions of Cloud, and the drawings of myself in the oval mirror. Since Monday I had made five more drawings, some with hats, some without, and with different expressions from pouting to neutral to fierce. Jack was looking over her shoulder. He whistled and glanced swiftly up at me.

  Miss Sedge put the pad down. She aimed a look straight into my eyes until I almost felt like the beggar in the temple about to be healed.

  “These are good,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? What are you going to do with them?”

  “Do with them?”

  Miss Sedge was gazing through me now. “I’m getting an idea.” She woke up her laptop and typed something into Google. Scrolled down. Clicked on a YouTube clip. In a few seconds an image rolled into the black box. Jack and I leaned toward the screen so that our arms were not quite touching.

  It started with waves on a shore. Water, sand, and sky were made out of charcoal lines that had been set in motion. The shore crackled in place; waves shuddered over it, withdrew, shuddered back in. A dog appeared. Two dogs. A cow. Children gathered; ran around; stroked the dogs; stroked the cow; ran away. The animals lay down. The shallow waves came and went around them. Birds winked on and off in the sky. The dogs and the cow melted away until all that was left was a light patch where they had been. No people, no children, no animals returned to the sand and no birds to the sky. The waves came and went, came and went, until everything froze and we were staring at the play triangle.

  I hit the triangle and replayed the clip.

  Jack said, “He made it all from drawings, didn’t he?”

  “Incredible.”

  “It’s jerky, that’s the only thing. Couldn’t he have blended them better?”

  “No!” I clapped him on the arm and he didn’t pull away. “I love the way even things that are supposed to be standing still are moving.”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Each thing has a ghost around it, from where he erased the last drawing. Everything looks like it’s made out of mistakes.”

  Miss Sedge said nothing, just sat there smiling openly like she had spent a long time winding up a special toy and was getting a kick out of watching it go. I’d had no idea she knew anything about art.

  “That’s what you can do with your drawings, Maddy. Animate them.”

  Antonio,

  English and art are my favorite subjects. I like science too, but mostly because I have the most amazing science teacher, Miss Sedge. I’m doing some serious biology this year. Plus I am interested in the environment. I am going on a march against the Keystone Pipeline in October.

  I don’t know what I want to do, I mean as a career or a job or whatever. They had these career advice sessions last year at school that got me panicked. How are we supposed to know? I have lots of questions for you, though. For example: How tall are you? What are your hobbies? What are my grandmother, grandfather, uncles, aunts, cousins in Spain like? What are Oscar and Daniel like? What are you trying to find out about the brain? How do you do the research—in a lab, or by examining people? Have you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat?

  Maddy

  Dear Maddy,

  As a scientist I am gravely concerned about what we are doing to the earth. We need young people to get involved. It is your world we are destroying. You are right, we need to rethink our place in the natural world with a little (a lot!) more humility. We can’t count on science to get us out of trouble. It is dangerous to think we can. The earth will survive, no matter what we do to it, but we might not be here to enjoy it!

  I am a good scientist and a terrible artist. I like to read, mostly nonfiction. Biographies and history books. I play the guitar, classical and also folk. I am six feet, two inches tall (just over two meters). Oliver Sacks does great work in observing the dysfunctional brain as a way of drawing conclusions about the normal brain. I am part of a laboratory that is studying memory and synaptic transmission. If we can understand better how neurons normally talk to one another, we might find out what happens when things go wrong. We do this by studying living cells from rat brains under the microscope. So yes,
it is laboratory work.

  Speaking of work, I’m afraid I have to go!

  Antonio

  13

  Jack found out from Mr. Yam what software to use and had it installed on my laptop. His dad bought us a copy stand and we fixed his camera to it in my room, where we had some privacy. Once we had something to work on together, things eased up between us. I almost forgot about that embarrassing day in his kitchen. We played around together with the frame rate and resolution on practice sketches that I erased or blocked out with white paint. Like everything else, it was harder than it looked, and we hadn’t yet decided on the image sequence.

  “Are you sure you want to use yourself?” he kept asking.

  “It was my idea, remember?”

  “It’s not too . . . close?”

  “The closer the better.”

  “Well, if you’re sure.”

  Then the next day: “You’re sure you don’t want to use something else?” until I got fed up and told him to stop. People think when you have disaster in your life that you don’t want to think about it. They don’t realize you think about it all the time. The animation gave me permission to think about my situation and at the same time make something from it. I tried to explain it to Jack, but I’m not sure he got it. I thought my head could be wrapped in a cloth, then slowly unwrapped, or I could gradually go bald. Jack said no.

  “Why not? Do you hate me being bald?”

  “Too obvious. What about little by little you’re covered with human habitation, starting like from the beginning of the Anthropocene? Caves, mud huts, cities?” We felt no closer to a solution, but we didn’t want to consult Miss Sedge. “What do we wake up thinking about?” said Jack. “That’s what she said.”

  To be honest, I did not want to tell Jack what I woke up thinking about. First thing in the morning was the worst. My mind worked away all night long, examining my life from every angle with no one to cover up for me or say comforting things; then, just when I was coming to, my mind gave me its conclusions before I had a chance to think. At that time of day the conclusions were always if not sad, then scary or bleak. Who wanted to hear about sad, scary, and bleak?