Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

I took one. No one was in charge. It was known by men the world over. There was comfort in the shared understanding.

Mr. Loury was an astronomer like my dad, or he had been, until his firing due to an attempted sabotage of the telescope. I didn’t know the details, and didn’t care, beyond the thrilling fact of sirens making their way in slow frustration up the curve of the mountain. He’d been to jail. Again, this called to me. It seemed he never slept. I never slept either. I stayed up all night reading, and during the day, I patrolled the mountain, checking for aberrations. I felt like I’d know them when I saw them.

Together, we watched the goings on of the spiral road, first a rangy cat patrolling, and then Mrs. Yin, our local ancient peril, driving too fast downhill in her Cadillac. I didn’t question the fact that it was seven in the morning and he was drinking already. It seemed reasonable. Some people drank coffee. Others drank beer. I was, I decided, a beer drinker. At last, Mr. Loury stood up, and looked at me for a moment, seemingly noticing for the first time that I was a kid. He waved his hand slightly. I thought he might be getting ready to send me home.

“My third mother moved to Alaska last night,” I told him. “She’s not coming back.”

“My wife died,” he told me. “That’s like Alaska, but more.”

I wanted to ask about the Great White Yonder, but I was worried he’d tell me too much, and so I didn’t. I couldn’t afford another summer of nightmares, the mouth of the shark opening and showing its chewed food like a cafeteria bully gone gigantic.

“Want to help me with a project?” Mr. Loury said. “A dollar an hour. Yardwork.”

“If it’s lawnmower,” I said, negotiating. “I charge by the square foot.” Lawnmowers weren’t safe for me. My toes begged to be run over. There was a deathwish in me. One of my ears had been the recipient of eleven emergency room stitches. Hidden under the skin of my right knee, there was a jagged piece of gravel that seemed to have become permanent.

“Digging,” Mr. Loury said. “Got a spare spade for you, you’re interested.”

Spare spade. I repeated the words in my head, a triumphant vision of myself at the bottom of a deep, dark hole in the dirt, looking up at a narrowed world.

Mr. Loury had already begun digging. He had a hole the size of a swimming pool, and a huge heap of dirt beside it. After an hour, the sun was high, and I yearned for the freezer, and the rocket-shaped popsicle I was pretty sure was left in there, amid the foil-wrapped unknowns.

“Why are we digging?” I asked Mr. Loury. I had a couple of ideas. One of them involved the burial of the Great White Yonder. I wondered if the stomach of the Great White Yonder still contained the body of Mr. Loury’s wife.

Mr. Loury looked at me like I was very, very stupid.

“We’re making a volcano,” he said, jerking his head toward the heap of dirt, which I’d taken for beside the point.

I’d made a volcano once, in a science class, out of dirt, vinegar, red food coloring, and baking soda. It erupted in the car, and the screams of my third mother, caught in the lava flow, still echoed in my ears. She’d cried. I’d cried too, in mortification. I’d made it to woo her.

“I don’t think real volcanoes are made the same way you make fake ones,” I said.

“This is how they made Krakatoa,” Mr. Loury said, with certainty. “This is how they made Pele.”

I thought about this.

“This is how they made the volcanoes on Mars,” Mr. Loury said, and went back to digging. “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to believe me, but you can look through the telescope and see for yourself.”

Volcanoes made on Mars. Volcanoes made on Earth. What if I could be one of the people who made volcanoes? What if this could be my career?

“ Who made them?” I managed. I could hardly breathe.

“People like us,” Mr. Loury said.

“On Mars? Martians?” I asked.

“Krakatoans, Martians, same thing,” he said. “I knew it when I saw you. You’re one of us.”

I heard the distinctive sounds of my father’s car coming down the spiral road. The brakes were failing, and so he kept an anchor in the passenger seat, attached to a rope, in case he lost control going downhill. I ignored the noise. No one was in charge, he’d said. If he wanted me home, he could scream.

I looked at Mr. Loury. He was offering me everything I’d ever wanted, and I was pretty sure he was about to laugh and take it back, the way adults always did.

“What are the volcanoes for?” I asked Mr. Loury, a last testing question. He eyeballed me. I swiped at my face with nervous, dusty fingers, but finally he nodded and surrendered everything.

“I wasn’t sure you were ready for this, but you seem man enough to take it. They’re observatories, but better. From inside a volcano, everyone knows you can look up. Almost no one knows that you can also look down.”

It was not as though I hadn’t been warned by my third mother about people who said things like this. It was not as though I cared. I was a goner. My dad, I imagined, would one day walk up the slope of this new volcano, and bend over to look down, startled to see me there inside it, my telescope aimed at the center of the earth. I’d be making charts of the things I saw there, the dark stars and explosions. There’d be worms the size of trains. I knew it, despairing with desire. There were mysteries in the Earth, and wonders. Even my own bellybutton, and the possibility that through it I might reach blood and guts, had been known to obsess me. Volcanoes were portals too.

My dad shouted for me from our front door, but I didn’t move. He increased volume and shifted to my full name. I didn’t flinch.

Mr. Loury looked at me suspiciously.

“That you he’s looking for?” Mr. Loury asked.

“Possibly,” I said.

“I thought you were a boy,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice now, a tightness. “You said you were a boy.”

“I’m a Krakatoan,” I said. Finally, with greed and great relief, I knew that I was one of something, part of a group. There was a destiny for me. My life wouldn’t have to be this way forever.

“Your hair’s too short for a girl,” Mr. Loury said, still staring at me with an odd expression on his face.

“It got caught in a pair of scissors,” I said, tersely. It hadn’t been an accident. There’d been braids.

“Shit,” Mr. Loury said.

“Shit,” I replied, and threw another shovelful of dirt onto the volcano. I tromped it down with my bare feet, and spat on the new volcano section.

All the while, Mr. Loury shook his head, and muttered to himself.

“Volcano gods need sacrifices,” he said, finally. “What are you going to do about that?”

“I have thirteen dollars in my piggy bank,” I said. “You have beer.”

“That won’t work,” he said, went inside his house, and slammed the door. “This one only wants boys. Don’t you know anything about volcanoes? Don’t you know anything about anything?”

His voice carried out into the yard, and it cracked at the end, with something I couldn’t figure. I was repulsed by whatever it was. Crying was for babies.

I stared at his front door, kicked it once, and then went home to defrost something frozen. I asked my dad what Mr. Loury had done at the observatory to get himself fired.

“Said the sky was black and all the stars had gone out,” my dad said. “Lost us a heap of funding, which is part of why we’re where we’re at now. Can’t even afford a paintjob. You see how it’s peeling.”

“And so they took him to jail?” I was startled. My dad snorted.

“No. Rick Loury went to jail because he commandeered the telescope, and tried to crash it into the floor. He thinks there’re stars inside the earth. He lost his wife, and then he lost his funding, and then he lost it.”