The Mystics of Mile End (3 page)

At the corner, we bumped into a couple of old Hasidic men, who had stopped all of a sudden when the streetlight turned red. They wore fur hats and short black pants and white stockings, and talked really fast in Yiddish. The fringes that poked out from under their coats dangled almost to the ground. Then the light turned green and they rushed ahead. We kept on walking.

“What's with those white stockings?” Alex whispered. “They look like girls' clothes.”

“I asked my dad about them once, actually. Because some of the Hasids around here wear white stockings and some wear black and I didn't understand why.”

“And?”

“And he said it might have to do with which sect they belong to. There are lots of different Hasidic sects in Mile End: Belz, Satmar, Bobov, Munkacs, Skver, Vishnitz, you name it. But when I asked how you could tell the different sects apart, he just said, ‘Who cares?'”

Alex shrugged like maybe that was a logical response. After a minute he said, “Lev.”

“Yeah?”

“That's a weird name.”

“Oh. I guess.”

“What does it mean? Does it mean something?”

“It's Hebrew for ‘heart.'”

“Where'd you get a name like that?”

“Um. My parents gave it to me?”

“Obviously. But like, what made them decide to call you
heart
? Were you named after somebody famous or something?”

“I don't think so.”

“They just thought that would be a cool name?”

“I guess.”

“Oh. Well.”

I was going to tell him not to sound so disappointed when he came to a stop in front of a redbrick driveway, the only one on the street with a basketball hoop. I didn't know what to say. All these years we'd been living just two blocks apart and I'd never even noticed.

I wanted to start playing right away but Alex said I should really let him give me some lessons first because he'd seen my layups in gym class and they weren't very scientific. He kept shooting and missing and saying, “Oops, okay, I miscalculated there, but this game is all about physics, trust me, just watch,” and then he'd shoot and miss again. After about twenty minutes, I stole the ball from him and dribbled it up to the net and shot and scored.

“Nice one!” called a voice.

I turned around and saw Sammy. “Thanks!” I called back, then added, “Alex was just giving me some pointers.”

“That's nice of you,” Sammy said to Alex. The tips of his ears went bright pink again.

Then he led us inside to get Popsicles out of the freezer. There
were only three left, a cherry, an orange, and a grape. I claimed the cherry. Alex let Sammy have the orange one even though I could tell that he didn't like grape, because, really, who does?

Except for us, the kitchen was empty. As far as I could tell, there was no one else home.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

“My mom's at work. She's a nurse at the hospital.”

“What about your dad?”

“He lives in Toronto.”

I didn't want to say the wrong thing, so I didn't say anything. Six seconds passed.

Then Alex announced, “
I
was named after somebody famous.”

“Really?” Sammy asked. “Who?”

“My grandfather. My mom's dad.”

“He was famous?”

“Sure.”

“What was his name?”

“Aleksandr Leonidovich Zaitsev.”

“What did he do?”

“Aleksandr Leonidovich Zaitsev? He was only one of the most important astronomers of all time! Who do you think came up with the idea for SETI?”

“What's SETI?” me and Sammy asked at the same time.

“
What's SETI?
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence!” Alex cried. Then he pointed upstairs. “Come on, I'll show you.”

Alex's room was small and messy and full of light. In one corner was a big white computer set up on a big white desk. In another corner was a huge white bookcase packed with books. The bed took up the third corner, and the sheets were decorated with spaceships and comets and shooting stars. In front of the window stood a white telescope, skinny and long. The floor was almost impossible to walk on. It was covered in heaps of ancient stuff: telephones, bat
teries, keyboards, computer mice, wires in red and blue and green and yellow, and, on top of the nearest pile, a TV remote control that someone, probably Alex, had taken apart.

“What's this?” Sammy asked, trailing her finger along a shiny antenna.

“That's my ham radio,” Alex said proudly. “It lets me communicate with amateur radio operators all around the world. My mom got it for me for Christmas last year.”

“And is that how you hear the other messages, too? The ones from the stars?”

He smiled, then shook his head. “For that, you need a way bigger radio.”

Alex explained that there was a group of astronomers who, instead of using normal telescopes to look at the universe's light, used radio telescopes to listen to its noise.

“Here, check it out,” Alex said, waving us over to his computer. “This is SETI.”

We went and looked at the screen. It was full of weird symbols I didn't understand. Squiggly waves, charts, and numbers. In the top left-hand corner, it said,
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home,
and then there was a picture of a satellite.

“Okay, so pretend you're a radio astronomer. What you're listening for with your radio telescope is a pattern hidden in the noise coming from outer space. That type of signal doesn't happen naturally, so if you detect it, that could mean evidence of alien technology. Okay?”

“Okay,” we said.

“So, once you pick up a pattern, what do you do? Well, so maybe you analyze the data digitally on your big ginormous supercomputer. But the more computer power you have, right, the more frequency ranges you can cover—and the more sensitivity you've got, too. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“So, in 1995, this guy named David Gedye said, hey, why don't we use the Internet to hook up, say, a million computers, like the ones in people's houses, to do some of this work for us? And that's exactly what he did. And that's what my computer is doing right now.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?”

“Why would you want a bunch of people you don't even know using your computer?”

Alex looked at me like he couldn't believe his ears. “Because it's
cool,
” he said. “Because it's
science
.” Then, just to make sure I understood how cool it was, he did a search for “Arecibo message.” He explained that SETI astronomers broadcast this radio message into outer space back in 1974. It was the first message human beings ever sent out on purpose. They aimed it at something called globular star cluster M13, which was approximately twenty-five thousand light years away. It was their way of saying hello. They were still waiting for a response.

Sammy pointed to an image on the screen. It showed a telescope, a stick figure, and something that looked like a strip of human DNA. “What's that?”

“That's the message.”

“It's a picture.”

“So?”

“So I thought you said the message was noise.”

“So?”

“So how can the message be a picture if it's also noise?”

“Well, because the message is written in binary.”

She looked confused, so Alex typed in “Binary” and what came up on the screen then was line after line after line of numbers.

Not just any old numbers, but zeros and ones specifically.

I was so excited, I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to keep from showing it.

“Think of the binary system like code,” Alex said. “Morse code also has two symbols: dots and dashes. It's always either one or the other. Dot or dash. Zero or one.” He tapped a finger on the desk. “Think of each tap as one and each rest as zero. That's all you need, see? You can say anything you want in the whole universe using just those symbols, and anyone else in the universe, as long as they know the code, can understand you and send a message back.”

“
Cool,
” Sammy said, and Alex grinned.

Then she looked at her watch and said we should probably go home, since Dad would be wondering where we were. Alex said okay, but before letting us leave he made us each pick out books to borrow. Sammy chose
Cracking Binary Code
and
Patterns in the Chaos: Listening for Intelligent Life in the Cosmos
. I didn't know what to choose, so Alex picked one out for me:
Important Names in Astronomy Today
. The book was gigantic, and even though I was positive I would never actually read it, I took it anyway because I could tell from the way his eyes started to shine that it would make Alex happy.

By the time we started making our way home, the sky was dark. The streets were empty. It was Saturday night and all the Hasids were probably still in synagogue. I looked at the clouds, trying to imagine the different voices that must've been traveling on the wind at that moment—radio signals, TV signals, messages sent into outer space—but the air around us was still and silent. We turned onto our block and it was hard to believe anyone on the planet had ever spoken a single word. To reassure myself, I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured a series of zeros and ones streaming through the universe. Sammy turned her key in the lock and we said hello into the darkness of the hallway. Nobody answered. For some reason, my stomach began to ache.

W
e always had Language Arts last on Mondays. I knew that Ms. Davidson liked to lock up her bike in the second-to-last rack behind the school, so on Monday morning instead of walking to Normal School I decided to take my bike. I locked it up next to her big blue bicycle with the shiny bell and the basket on the handlebars. Then I went to class.

When the bell rang at the end of last period, I hunched over my journal and kept right on writing, like I was very concentrated on my thoughts. After a while, I saw Ms. Davidson's dress out of the corner of my eye, so I pressed my nose close to the page for extra believability. Then she said, “Lev? The bell rang a few minutes ago. Shouldn't you be getting home?”

I looked up fast and checked the clock, then made my eyes wide to show how surprised I was. I followed her out of the class and down the stairs and into the empty lot behind the school.

“I left my bike over here,” I explained. “I love biking, don't you?”

She smiled. “Love it!”

We reached the second-to-last rack and she started unlocking her bike. I leaned over to unlock mine, which was so close to hers it was actually touching. For a second I was nervous that she might get suspicious, but when she saw what I was doing she just laughed.

“Well!” she said. “Look at that.”

She was already pulling her bike out of the rack, so I knew there wasn't any time to lose. Using my most casual voice, I asked, “When's your favorite time of day to go biking?”

She thought about this for a second, and while she thought, I prayed. Then, because God sometimes listens to you if you pray really hard, she gave the exact answer I was hoping for.

“Night,” she said with a laugh. “I like a good middle-of-the-night bicycle ride! Why do you ask?”

“That's so funny! My dad loves to go biking at night. He does it all the time!”

“Is that so?”

“Sure!” I said. Then I started to tell her about the time Dad took me and Sammy out for a bike ride in the middle of the night. “It was
four in the morning,
” I said, to make sure she knew how much he liked the thing she also liked. “We went all the way from our house, which by the way if you want to know is 5479 Hutchison, all the way to the mountain and then all the way back! And we didn't get home until
sunrise
.”

“What a fun adventure!” she said, climbing onto her bike. “Well, Lev, I'll see you—”

“Wait!” I wanted to tell her some more interesting things about Dad, like that he was a professor and highly intelligent and understood completely about Very Private Things and could make macaroni and cheese better than anyone else's dad in the neighborhood, which I knew for a fact was true even though he hadn't actually made it for us in ages, but all of a sudden I looked down and something very small and very white caught my eye.

There was a flower in her pedal. From the way it was sticking out, I could tell she hadn't put it there on purpose. It'd just gotten caught as she rode her way through a forest or meadow or something like that. It made me feel sad, but I didn't understand why.

“Lev? Was there something else you wanted to tell me?”

I shook my head.

“Okay.” She smiled. “I'll see you tomorrow!” And she pedaled away.

I walked my bike down the street, trying to find the reason why I'd suddenly felt so sad, but I couldn't. This was a thing that happened to me sometimes, I got sad for no reason. Once, when I was eight, I'd asked Sammy what she thought was causing it. I thought maybe it was some kind of sickness, and if it was a sickness it probably had a name, and I wanted to know the name of it. But she just told me not to worry, it happened to her, too, it happened all the time.

When I turned the corner, I saw that Mr. Katz was out on his lawn again. He was sitting on the grass surrounded by the cans of green paint. He had the paintbrush in his hand, and even though he'd already gone over all the leaves once, he was going over them all again.

Because I had nothing better to do, I asked if I could help with the second coat. He said okay, so I sat down and picked up a leaf. The sun was shining and the birds were singing and I felt like I could sit there for hours, warm paint squishing between my hands. I knew I was doing a good job because after I painted a leaf it looked even realer than the leaves of the old oak tree on the lawn. Mr. Katz was happy, too, and when I left he said I could come back and help out some other time if I wanted.