“Kinda,” I said.
“It means if we were traveling at the speed of light, it would take us forty-five minutes to get from Earth to Jupiter, so the Jupiter we’re seeing right now is actually Jupiter forty-five minutes ago. But, like, just above the trees there, those five stars that kind of make a crooked W?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Right, that’s Cassiopeia. And the crazy thing is, the star on the top, Caph—it’s 55 light-years away. Then there’s Shedar, which is 230 light-years away. And then Navi, which is 550 light-years away. It’s not only that we aren’t close to them; they aren’t close to one another. For all we know, Navi blew up five hundred years ago.”
“Wow,” I said. “So, you’re looking at the past.”
“Yeah, exactly.” I felt him fumbling for something—his phone, maybe—and then glanced down and realized he was trying to hold my hand. I took it. We were quiet beneath the old light above us. I was thinking about how the sky—at least this sky—wasn’t actually black. The real darkness was in the trees, which could be seen only in silhouette. The trees were shadows of themselves against the rich silver-blue of the night sky.
I heard him turn his head toward me and could feel him looking at me. I wondered why I wanted him to kiss me, and how to know why you want to be with someone, how to disentangle the messy knots of wanting. And I wondered why I was scared to turn my head toward him.
Davis started talking about the stars again—as the night got darker, I could see more and more of them, faint and wobbly, just teetering on the edge of visibility—and he was telling me about light pollution and how I could see the stars moving if I waited long enough, and how some Greek philosopher thought the stars were pinpricks in a cosmic shroud. Then, after he fell quiet for a moment, he said, “You don’t talk much, Aza.”
“I’m never sure what to say.”
He mimicked me from the day we’d met again by the pool. “Try saying what you’re thinking. That’s something I never ever do.”
I told him the truth. “I’m thinking about mere organism stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“I can’t explain it,” I said.
“Try me.”
I looked over at him now. Everyone always celebrates the easy attractiveness of green or blue eyes, but there was a depth to Davis’s brown eyes that you just don’t get from lighter colors, and the way he looked at me made me feel like there was something worthwhile in the brown of my eyes, too.
“I guess I just don’t like having to live inside of a body? If that makes sense. And I think maybe deep down I am just an instrument that exists to turn oxygen into carbon dioxide, just like merely an organism in this . . . vastness. And it’s kind of terrifying to me that what I think of as, like, my quote unquote self isn’t really under my control? Like, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, my hand is sweating right now, even though it’s too cold for sweating, and I really hate that once I start sweating I can’t stop, and then I can’t think about anything else except for how I’m sweating. And if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know? Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.”
“I can’t tell that you’re sweating at all, actually. But I bet that doesn’t help.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t.” I took my hand from his and wiped it on my jeans, then wiped my face with the sleeve of my hoodie. I disgusted myself. I was revolting, but I couldn’t recoil from my self because I was stuck inside of it. I thought about how the smell of your sweat isn’t from sweat itself, but from the bacteria that eat it.
I started telling Davis about this weird parasite, Diplostomum pseudospathaceum. It matures in the eyes of fish, but can only reproduce inside the stomach of a bird. Fish infected with immature parasites swim in deep water to make it harder for birds to spot, but then, once the parasite is ready to mate, the infected fish suddenly start swimming close to the surface. They start trying to get themselves eaten by a bird, basically, and eventually they succeed, and the parasite that was authoring the story all along ends up exactly where it needs to be: in the belly of a bird. The parasite breeds there, and then baby parasites get crapped out into the water by birds, whereupon they meet with a fish, and the cycle begins anew.
I was trying to explain to him why this freaked me out so much but not really succeeding, and I recognized that I’d pulled the conversation very far away from the point where we’d held hands and been close to kissing, that now I was talking about parasite-infected bird feces, which was more or less the opposite of romance, but I couldn’t stop myself, because I wanted him to understand that I felt like the fish, like my whole story was written by someone else.
I even told him something I’d never actually said to Daisy or Dr. Singh or anybody—that the pressing of my thumbnail against my fingertip had started off as a way of convincing myself that I was real. As a kid, my mom had told me that if you pinch yourself and don’t wake up, you can be sure that you’re not dreaming; and so every time I thought maybe I wasn’t real, I would dig my nail into my fingertip, and I would feel the pain, and for a second I’d think, Of course I’m real. But the fish can feel pain, is the thing. You can’t know whether you’re doing the bidding of some parasite, not really.
After I said all that, we were quiet for a long time, until finally he said, “My mom was in the hospital for, like, six months after her aneurysm. Did you know that?” I shook my head. “I guess she was kind of in a coma or whatever—like, she couldn’t talk or anything, or feed herself, but sometimes if you put your hand in her hand, she would squeeze.
“Noah was too young to visit much, but I got to. Every single day after school, Rosa would take me to the hospital and I would lie in bed with her and we would watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the TV in her room.
“Her eyes were open and everything, and she could breathe by herself, and I would lie there next to her and watch TMNT, and I would always have the Iron Man in my hand, my fingers squeezed into a fist around it, and I would put my fist in her hand and wait, and sometimes she would squeeze, her fist around my fist, and when it happened, it made me feel . . . I don’t know . . . loved, I guess.
“Anyway, I remember once Dad came, and he stood against the wall at the edge of the room like she was contagious or something. At one point, she squeezed my hand, and I told him. I told him she was holding my hand, and he said, ‘It’s just a reflex,’ and I said, ‘She’s holding my hand, Dad, look.’ And he said, ‘She’s not in there, Davis. She’s not in there anymore.’
“But that’s not how it works, Aza. She was still real. She was still alive. She was as much a person as any other person; you’re real, but not because of your body or because of your thoughts.”
“Then what?” I said.
He sighed. “I don’t know.”
“Thanks for telling me that,” I said. I’d turned to him and was looking at his face in profile. Sometimes, Davis looked like a boy—pale skin, acne on his chin. But now he looked handsome. The silence between us grew uncomfortable until eventually I asked him the stupidest question, because I actually wanted to know its answer. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking it’s too good to be true,” he said.
“What is?”
“You.”
“Oh.” And then after a second, I added, “Nobody ever says anything is too bad to be true.”
“I know you saw the picture. The night-vision picture.” I didn’t answer, so he continued. “That’s the thing you know, that you want to tell the cops. Did they offer you a reward for it?”
“I’m not here looking for—” I said.
“But how can I ever know that, Aza? How will I ever know? With anyone? Did you give it to them yet?”
“No, we won’t. Daisy wants to, but I won’t let her. I promise.”