Relativity (15 page)

E
THAN SAT
at the front of the bus with a plastic bag on his lap. Constant motion felt exactly like sitting still. If he was going at the same speed as the bus, and in the same direction, then it didn't feel like he was moving. The bus stopped, then started again. Ethan jerked backward. These streets were unfamiliar. He looked for markers, worried he'd gone too far.

That morning he'd walked to school, even made it all the way to the other side of the road opposite the front gate. But the bell's sharp clang, the high-pitched shriek of it, made him hesitate. He couldn't go back to school, not after that meeting with Will's parents, not after everybody heard how his father went to jail. Everyone already thought he was weird; now they'd think he was weirder. Ethan turned around and walked in the other direction. He felt thuds of shame beat in his chest. Every student at his school probably knew all his secrets.

The bus turned the corner and onto High Street. Ethan recognized the chemist on the corner. This was his stop. He pressed the bell and stood up.

From the outside coming in, the Sydney Children's Hospital looked different. Brighter colors, higher walls, overcrowded atrium: doctors running into nurses, visiting family members and friends looking lost, patients strolling down the hall with their drips on wheels. Music played in the café and the coffee machine hissed.

Ethan walked up the stairs and over to Ward C1 North. Alison was still in the same bed. She was wearing the red and yellow cap again, although she wasn't hooked to the EEG machine. Looking up briefly, Alison must have seen Ethan at the door, but she kept her head down in the pages of
Dolly
magazine and frowned.

“Alison,” Ethan said slowly.

She turned the page of her magazine in a dramatic way but didn't respond.

“I know I said I'd come on the weekend, but I wasn't allowed.”

Alison snapped the pages shut. “What do you want?”

“To see you.”

“You could've called. Maybe I was busy today.” A smile surfaced from the corners of Alison's mouth but she straightened her face and opened the magazine again. “I almost forgot you were ever here,” she said coolly.

“Really?”

Alison laughed. “No, I'm totally trolling you. I nearly went crazy when you left. Last week, there was this girl in your bed who kept talking to herself. So weird. Luckily she checked out yesterday.”

He perched on the edge of her bed. “How are you?”

“I don't understand why they won't let me go home. It's only epilepsy. I'm not dying. The problem is I'm taking heaps of medicine and it's not doing anything. They have to let me out of here soon. I think I'm getting bedsores,” she said, scratching her leg.

“Gross,” Ethan said.

Alison laughed again. “You're the most gullible person I've ever met.” She lifted her nightie up. “See? No sores. Hey, shouldn't you be at school?”

“I have an appointment with Dr. Saunders,” Ethan said, although the appointment actually wasn't until tomorrow. “Oh! I almost forgot. I brought you something.” He lifted the plastic bag onto the bed and pulled out a bundle of styrofoam balls, each a different size and color—grays, greens, browns, reds, blues, and whites. Wires attached to the balls were in loose knots and Ethan started to untangle them.

Alison looked at the balls. “What are they?”

“Wait,” Ethan said, as he stood on the bed and fixed wires to the light fitting. It took a couple of minutes to arrange—he nearly lost his balance and stepped on Alison's leg twice—but when he was done, he pulled her up by the hand so she could stand beside him.

“It's pretty,” Alison said, staring at the dangling spheres. “But what is it?”

“The solar system.” He pointed to the styrofoam planets. “This little one is Mercury, the yellow one is Venus, obviously that's Earth, this red one is Mars, and Jupiter is the biggest. Saturn has the rings, I made them with an old CD. Uranus is light blue.” Ethan paused; Alison was giggling. “Then this dark blue one is Neptune. And that's Pluto, although it's technically not a planet anymore. And that's the sun in the middle. I just thought since you can't go out, I'd bring the solar system to you.”

Alison touched Ethan's elbow. “That's really sweet.”

“It's nothing,” he said, sitting down again. “I made it for a school project last year. It's not even to scale.”

She pulled up her striped socks and crossed her legs. “I wish I could go outside. Feel the sun. What's it like being back in the real world?”

“Boring. But Mum let me have pizza for dinner four times this week.”

“Did you ever talk to your mum about . . .” Alison trailed off. “You know.”

Ethan tipped his head back to look at the solar system. Jupiter, the largest of the styrofoam balls, swayed from side to side like a pendulum. It was hypnotic. But in the real solar system, Jupiter wouldn't swing. It would rotate on its axis faster than all the other planets. So fast that Jupiter had ten-hour days.

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“You can talk to me,” Alison said.

“If you mean talk about my father,” he said, not taking his eyes off Jupiter, “then there's not really anything to say.”

“It was just an idea. I thought it might make you feel better.”

Ethan lay down on Alison's bed. At the moment, nothing really made him feel better. Especially talking. He felt like he was carrying something rotten inside him—food poisoning, a tumor—and he couldn't make it disappear. It was a feeling he didn't know and couldn't name. Lodged in a formless place between anger and pain, somewhere between discomfort and sadness. Thinking about his father made him feel weird.

Both of them were quiet. They lay on their backs, eyes fixed to the ceiling, as the planets gently rocked back and forth above their heads.

Ω

QUARK WAS EATING
an umbrella by the door when Ethan arrived home. He put his keys on the shelf in the hall and stooped to take the umbrella out of the rabbit's teeth. Quark turned his back to Ethan and hopped off down the hall. Ethan opened the umbrella; there were now several small holes in its blue fabric. He pulled the broken canopy over his head, light from the ceiling lamp spilling from the holes and onto the floor.

“That's bad luck,” Mum said.

Her voice startled Ethan. She shouldn't be home this early. “What is?”

“Opening those inside.”

Ethan shut the umbrella. “Bad luck is actually just a statistical probability.”

Mum raised an eyebrow. “So, how was school?”

“Fine.”

“That's interesting, because Mr. Thompson called me to ask why you weren't at school today. Which was news to me, because this morning you were wearing your uniform. Do you have any idea how worried I was? I didn't know where you were. What if something happened to you? You could have been dead!” She was talking too fast. “And skipping school? Did you think I wouldn't find out? I wasn't born yesterday. I was honestly just about to call the police. I can't believe you'd do something so stupid, Ethan Forsythe. I've never been so worried in my life.”

“But I'm not dead.”

“It's not funny, Ethan. You're in serious trouble, don't you dare act like it's a joke. Why didn't you go to school? Where have you been all day?”

“Nowhere,” he said, focusing on his shoes. He couldn't look at her when she was angry. Her face lost its warmth and her eyes changed. They were supposed to be a team; she was supposed to be on his side.

“ ‘Nowhere' isn't an answer. You were somewhere. Tell me.” Mum raised her voice. “Where were you? Don't lie to me.”

You lied to me, Ethan wanted to say. You kept a secret from me for twelve years. But he didn't. He said nothing. He couldn't even look at his mum as she kept yelling and scolding him. Going on and on about hypothetical gutters he could've collapsed in, alternate universes where he was hit by a bus.

Ethan knew that parallel universes might exist. It was mathematically inevitable. Inside an infinite universe, everything must repeat at some point. There were only a finite number of ways particles could be arranged, so every possible configuration of particles in space might happen multiple times. Maybe one day we'd figure out how to visit these alternate universes. Quantum-jump from world to world. Pause time, slow down seconds, speed them up. Go back in time and change the past.

Maybe Ethan could rewind to this morning, decide to go to school, and in that parallel universe he wouldn't be in trouble. Or he could go even further back, along the stretching elastic paths of time, and change his destiny. What if quantum mechanics meant that Ethan could stop his father from shaking him? Perhaps in some parallel universe the three of them were the happiest family, laughing and chatting, about to sit down to dinner together.

“Are you even listening to me?” Mum asked.

Ethan blinked, rushing back to the present. He nodded at his mum. But in his head he was calculating the exponential expansion of the Big Bang and the statistical probabilities that might exist in the chaos of an inflationary universe.

Ω

AT THE DOCTOR'S OFFICE,
the waiting room was crowded. Mum took an empty seat, but Ethan studied the posters of candy-colored brains stuck on the walls. They looked like maps. Walled cities of the mind with winding roads, valleys, rivers; the topography of the brain plotted like a street directory. Pink highway of the cerebellum, blue suburbs of the frontal lobe, green hills of the temporal lobe. Ethan touched the back of his head. Could all of that—this complex cartography, an entire city—really exist inside his head?

Ethan looked around the waiting room at the other patients. It was the right word for the sick: patients needed patience. Always waiting—for the doctor, a bed, a cure. A little girl sat on her mother's lap. The woman combed her daughter's hair to cover what looked like a large scar on the right side of her skull. Near Ethan's feet, a boy was playing on the floor, driving toy cars in circles and crashing them into each other. He yelled during every collision.

“Crash!” the boy said. “Boom!”

An orange race car struck Ethan's shoe. He kneeled down and picked it up.

“Here you go,” Ethan said, handing the car back.

“Fanks,” said the boy. He had a strong lisp.

“What's your name?”

“Steve,” the boy stuttered. He fought with his tongue, couldn't command the sounds in his name. They came too thickly and fast.

“My name's Ethan. How old are you?”

Steve held up his fingers. “Four.”

“Are you waiting to see the doctor too?”

“Yes,” Steve lisped. He offered Ethan a car and they played together. Streaks in the carpet became roads, bumps in the floor were ramps, other people's legs were mountains to climb. Steve was excited by roadside accidents. Driving too fast and crashing into furniture made him giggle. He didn't seem brainsick and Ethan wondered what was wrong. Did a problem with his brain cause Steve's lisp?

At four, Ethan hadn't spoken clearly either. Maybe his brain injury was responsible, it made sense now. He remembered seeing a speech pathologist; imitating the strange noises she made—rounded and unrounded vowels, hard and soft consonants—and learning how to transform these strangled sounds into actual words. Maybe something bad had happened to Steve's brain. Maybe he'd been shaken too. Perhaps it was actually a normal thing that happened to lots of other kids.

Steve crashed his car into the coffee table. “Boom!”

“Ethan Forsythe,” the receptionist called out. “The doctor will see you now.”

Ω

THEY SAT ON THE OTHER
side of the desk, facing Dr. Saunders. On their left was a glazed porcelain bust; it made Ethan think of a head-shaped teapot. Its brain was divided into segments, sliced into rooms in a house, or apartments in a building. Each brain-room had its own name, painted on the shiny white surface in dark-blue ink.

“How are you feeling, Ethan?” The doctor opened his file.

“Much better,” Mum said immediately. “His appetite still isn't back to normal yet, but he seems more like himself.”

“And what about the medication?”

“The only side effect he's been having is drowsiness. Otherwise he's doing just fine.” Mum touched Ethan's hair and he squirmed in his seat.

That wasn't true; he hated the medicine. It changed the speed of things, made the world slow down. Like whoever was in charge of the soundtrack to his life had altered the tempo—its chemical music wasn't fast enough for Ethan's regular pace.

Dr. Saunders gave her a delicate smile. “Claire, would you mind if I spoke to Ethan alone?”

Mum gripped the strap of her handbag; her knuckles went white. “Why? What's wrong? Why can't I be here?”

“Don't worry,” the doctor said. “He'll be fine. I want to talk to Ethan about his brain. It's standard procedure. We won't be long.”

She paused for a defiant moment, unflinching and wary. Mum leaned over to Ethan and whispered. “Come outside and get me if you feel unsure or scared, okay?”

He nodded.

Then Mum stalled by the door before reluctantly leaving the office.

Ethan pointed to the porcelain bust. “What's that?”

“This is Phil,” said Dr. Saunders, introducing the head. “He comes from an old branch of medicine, now obsolete, called phrenology. People used to believe certain areas of your brain were responsible for character traits. Phrenologists felt the bumps on your head to determine what sort of person you were. There were twenty-seven different parts, what they called brain organs. For example,” he said, pointing to a section of Phil's head, “this part of your brain was thought to indicate whether or not you were evil. Nonsense, though. Not real science. The brain doesn't actually work like that.”