The Floating Cradle

Twenty-Three

I thought she'd have it in a day. She looks like a witchdoctor caught up in some complicated divination, poring over the wires and chips like they're bird bones, drawing diagrams, crossing them out, muttering under her breath as though refining incantations. None of it makes sense to me, of course. If I didn't know her so well, know her great personal stake in the outcome, I might be suspicious she was putting on a show. But that's not Allie; she wears it all on her sleeve.

"It's just mirrors," I remember her explaining as I balanced on her lap, peering through the eyepiece. "The light hits a curved mirror, shaped like this"—cupping her hand—"and then that mirror focuses it together to make the thing you're seein' look bigger. Then, there's another, littler mirror in there to send the light to your eye."

The telescope might as well have been magic to me back then, ogling Saturn, its unmistakable rings sticking out on either side like Muppet ears. Since I was very small, I've known Allie wasn't built like me, like any of us; she lacks a sort of compunction, not in a moral sense, but a mortal sense—she doesn't fear her limits, never hesitates to grapple with the sorts of things most people are humbled by, the sorts of things that remind us we are small and containable. Humility, fear—a peripheral knowledge of them is what keeps me from feeling them fully, keeps me cautious. I don't know if Allie's learned how to embrace these things, or if she's simply untouched by them. I've always set my own limits lest someone set them for me, or, even worse, I stumble across them in myself. We'd have no bombs if everyone thought this way, I think. No flu vaccines either, no airplanes. No Cradle. No tanta.

When I think of Allie and the telescope, of her loquacious habit of drawing back the curtain on the inner workings of everything from stars to kidneys to a rotary milking parlor we once saw in an issue of Modern Farmer, I feel like I'm looking at a point of the universe where the rules don't apply—or at least, they never did before. She dared—and succeeded!—to shrink a planet, make it scrutable, an amusing plaything for her little sister to summon at her leisure. She blazed through school batting a thousand, abandoned home with nothing but the faith that she was one in a million—and, what do you know, she was! Broadcasting a message feels so small, so simple a feat in comparison—but only because it's her.

Maybe I was the dreamer all along.

The genius exhales, runs her fingers through her hair (getting greasier by the hour), and turns to her husband, resting a hand on his foot, stroking it lightly with her thumb. He opens one of his marbled eyes, sighs in response. There is an unpleasant rheum about his nostrils—both pairs—and his mouth, his breaths shallower and quicker than usual. The tanta call it "Flat Blood," I heard him tell Pete, the only one of us willing to ask. The cells lose their ability to bind oxygen, binding other gases instead, effectively suffocating him. I imagine a bottle of Coke with all the fizz let out, but I know that's not right.

"Entirely reversible," he assured the cellar yesterday (or at least I think it was yesterday). "I've skipped a couple comps before, as a stupid teenager."

"How are you feelin'?" Allie asks him now. He holds up his sheet of paper with a wry smile. 4.

"I'm winnin'," she teases, holding up her own. 8.

"What'chya got so far, Al?" Lyle asks. A flush creeps up her neck.

"Well, I—it can't send out a signal yet, but I got it so I can have output from the Nokia go through the—"

"Can you make a recordin'?" Lyle speaks slowly, picking his words. "Just—I was thinkin', we need his voice to confirm with the Whelk, right? Maybe we ought to record him sayin' his bit, just in case...in case he's too tired once you got the thing set up."

Nobody's fooled. Allie's cheeks pinch in anger.

"In other words, the dead can't talk?"

"If you don't wanna be practic—"

"It makes sense. I'll do it," Jack says. "I mean, you can make a recording, right, Love?"

Allie looks torn. She turns on Daddy's old phone.

"Ready?" She holds her thumb over the button. Jack nods. "Talk...now."

I want to jam my fingers in my ears, but something tells me this would be rude. The dissonant wailing is like death metal played in a canon, like nails on a chalkboard, like yelping coyotes and squealing semi-trailer tires, like—well, you get the picture. Lord knows what he's saying. Nobody speaks when he's finished.

"Show's over," he grunts. "You're welcome."