The Color Master: Stories (15 page)

“How was your night?”

“Okay,” I said.

She looked up, whisk in hand, brow furrowed.

“I went to a war protest.”

“There was another one?” she said, disappointed.

“A bad one,” I said. “A fake. I saw a hundred people have sex and then get their wallets lifted.”

“No kidding?”

“And then I had tea with an old man who had dredged a river.”

She raised her eyebrows, curious. I told her a brief version, leaving out the part about his daughter. I also left out that I’d
gone into his house, alone, and pretended instead that I met him at a late-night teahouse.

“He dredged the river to find your ring?”

“No,” I said. “I made that part up.”

“I bet it was a different ring,” she said.

“Looked exactly the same,” I said. “Same scratch. Same silver tweak.”

“Weird.” She wrinkled her nose. Only then did I see that her eyes were red, and that she kept dabbing them with a wet tissue, which in clump and formation looked a whole lot like the same tissue she’d been using earlier in the day.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“You can use a new tissue.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s only water.”

I didn’t ask why she’d been crying. I figured she probably had a good reason.

“Arlene,” I said.

“Yeah?”

I didn’t know what to ask her. How to be a person? On the first day of school, she had sought me out: saw me, made a beeline, and held out her hand for hello. “You have such great hands,” she had told me. My hands? She’d held one up and pointed out the shape of my fingers, the squareness, the good knuckles. “You were watching my hands?” I asked, and she said that during the orientation activity, when we had to wave at airplanes for some reason we could not recall, she had noticed my hands waving because they seemed like the hands of an interesting person. In the fall, she would be doing the Peace Corps or Teach For America, depending on which program took her first. Arlene, who made sure every used item
went into the right bin because she wanted all things, everything, to find its way back into the world, new.

She was standing right next to me with her tissue. I put my head on her shoulder. Closed my eyes. “Will we stay friends?”

“Who? You and me?”

I nodded. The room smelled like waffle batter.

“What do you mean?” she said.

Those embroidered suns lit my eyelids, shining up from her bathrobe. “We have nothing in common,” I said.

“Oh, shush.” She started to laugh. “Human. You human. You silly human,” she said, leaning her head against mine.

We met the new teacher for origin class. He was tall, with a mustache. He was our last resort. The family-genealogy class had failed. The trip to the zoo to look at monkeys had failed. The investigation of sperm and egg in a dish had failed. All were interesting, but they were not enough. Where did the sperm come from? Where did the monkey come from? Where did Romania come from?

He sat in a chair at the front of the rug.

We began all at once, everywhere, he said.

We sat quietly, waiting.

Has he started? someone whispered.

Yes, he said. I have started. We began all at once, everywhere.

We thought about that.

But before that?

He shrugged. Goes beyond what we know, he said. All we can know is the universe.

I thought we started in a dot, someone said.

He shook his head. He brought out his lunch in a brown bag from his briefcase.

No dot, he said. A dot is at a point, and if at a point, things are also not at that point.

We watched as he chewed a baby carrot.

A very well-packed dot, someone else offered. From which all things hurled free. Not unlike a suitcase.

Nope, he said. Everywhere, all at once.

Then what? someone asked.

After that? he said. Well, at first, it was fast. Everything accelerating fast. Everything wanting to get out.

Get out of what?

Poor wording, he said. Just rapid acceleration. Then it slowed down. Now expansion is accelerating steadily.

What expansion?

Oh, the universe is expanding, he said, wiping his mouth. We found that out in 1929. From Hubble.

We nodded. This made sense. It had been in a suitcase and then—

No suitcase! he said, stomping his foot. All at once, everywhere!

Someone started to cry. Someone else pushed Martha into the rug.

How about this, he said. He put away his lunch bag and opened his briefcase again and brought out sock puppets to show us personified matter and radiation. So, he said, what happened was that, after around four hundred thousand years, everything slowed and cooled, and matter grew lumpy due to gravity, and radiation stayed smooth. Before that, the two lived evenly together.

He wound the two socks together and then moved them away from each other, and the lumpy sock got all lumpified, ready to form galaxies, and he stuffed a battery-operated lightbulb inside the smooth sock so that the light beneath the fabric radiated.

Nice, we said.

The origin of galaxies, he said, with a flourish.

Are those your socks?

No, he said. I bought the socks at a store.

Won’t the lightbulb burn the sock?

No, he said, coughing. It is a specially insulated sock.

Are we accelerating right now?

Yes, he said.

Edgar grabbed on to his seat. I feel it! he shouted. He fell off his chair.

The teacher removed the socks from his hands. We can’t feel it, he said. But everything is moving away from everything else, and it does mean that, in a few billion years, even our beautiful neighbors may be drifting out of reach.

He looked sad, saying that. We felt a sadness. In a billion years, our beautiful neighbors pulling away. But, surely, we will not be here in a billion years. Surely we will be something new, something that might not conceive of distance in the same way. We told him this, and he nodded, but it was wistful.

He had set up a telescope on a corner of the roof, and we went up to take a look.

This is time travel, he said, narrowing an eye to set the lens. Because the light is old. We’re seeing back in time.

No, we said, wrinkling our noses. We are seeing right now, today.

No, he said, the light has to travel to us and it takes millions of years. What you’re seeing is time.

Excuse me, we said. We were embarrassed to correct him. He seemed so smart. What we’re seeing is space.

It’s space, yes, he said. It’s also time. You’re seeing what has already happened.

That’s absurd, we said, though we did not move.

We make bigger telescopes, radio telescopes, he said, to
see back all the way. We can go back thirteen billion years now! Almost to the Big Bang.

No, we said.

Yes!

You can see all that way back?

Yes!

And? we said, sitting up. The suitcase?

We pictured it at the end of a telescope. The longest, biggest telescope ever made. A tiny suitcase, of a pleasing brown leather.

Well, he said, leaning on the side wall. We can see very close to the beginning, but at around 400,000 years, the universe goes opaque.

We almost tossed him off the roof then. We were right there at the edge.

It’s true, he said. We can see all the way to about year 400,000! Can you believe that? But before that, it’s veiled.

We stopped to consider this. The universe began in a veil.

Like a bride? we said.

He smiled for the first time that day.

Sure, he said, relenting. Like a bride.

And she takes off her veil at 400,000?

She does, he said. We see her quite well after that.

So who’d she marry? we ask, settling ourselves at his feet. When a bride removes her veil, it’s the moment of marriage.

I don’t know, he said, scratching his head. Everything? Us?

The doctor went to see the rabbi. “Tell me, rabbi, please,” he said, “about God.”

The rabbi pulled out some books. She talked about Jacob, wrestling the angel. She talked about Heschel and the kernel of wonder as a seedling that could grow into awe. She tugged at her braid and told a Hassidic story about how it is said that at the end of your life you will need to apologize to God for the ways you have not lived.

“Not for the usual sins,” she said. “For the sin of living small.”

The doctor sat in his suit in his chair and fidgeted. Although he had initiated the conversation, he found the word “God” offensive, the same way he disliked it when people spoke about remodeling their kitchens.

“I’m sorry,” he said, standing. “I cannot seem to understand what you are saying. Are you speaking English?”

“English?” said the rabbi, closing a book. Dust motes floated off the pages into the room and caught the light as they glided upward. She wrinkled her forehead as if she was double-checking in there. “Yes,” she said.

A few months later, the rabbi became sick. She had a disease of the blood, a disease that needed weekly transfusions that she scheduled on Wednesdays so she would be at her best for Shabbat.

The doctor who had come to see her was a doctor of blood. A transfusionist. He had chosen this profession because blood was at the center of all of it. It was either blood, or the heart, or the brain. Or the lungs. He picked blood because it was everywhere. He was never even slightly interested in skin, or feet, joints, or even genitals. It was the most central core stuff of life and death that made him tolerate all those god-awful courses in anatomy and biochemistry.

She thought of him as she sat with her husband, staring at their enfolded hands, wondering what to do.

“That man,” she said, looking up. “That man who came by a few months ago.”

When the rabbi was in her paper gown she looked smaller, of the earth, and the doctor did not mind the role reversal.

“I’m so sorry you have to go through this,” he said.

The rabbi lay down on the cold table. She offered her arm. The blood drained from her; the blood of another person filled her. The doctor stood beside her and reset the instruments in a line.

The rabbi came for many transfusions, and she recovered at a brisk pace, filled with the blood of Hindus and Lutherans. The treatments went so well she didn’t have to visit as often anymore, and the doctor missed seeing her at the clinic. After a month had gone by, he went to her office again, where he found her talking to another rabbi, massaging the bottom of a stockinged foot. He stood outside the door as she sifted
through her shelves, finding a book, opening it to a page, the two rabbis huddled shoulder to shoulder, commenting, gesturing. The age-old activity of Jews.

The doctor stayed near the door. He was not one to interrupt.

It was when the rabbi was locking up that she glanced over and saw him. Her color was back. Her eyes were clear. She was an attractive woman, with a kind, bearish husband, one raven-haired child, pink dots of warmth in the centers of her cheeks. She hugged him, and pressed his hand, and thanked him, and he said he would like to talk to her again.