Relativity (3 page)

“Where'd you go, Will?” Daniel asked. “You and your boyfriend get lost?”

“Ethan's not my boyfriend.”

“Yeah, he is. You love Stephen Hawking. You're gonna marry him.” Daniel looked pleased with himself.

Will glanced back at Ethan. “He's not even my friend.”

Ethan pointed at the dinosaur. “Fossils show that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was alive during the Cretaceous Period, which was the last segment of the Mesozoic Era. Did you know the Mesozoic Era is an interval of geological time that started about 250 million years ago?” He swallowed his breath. “That sounds like ages, but dinosaurs were only alive for a little bit of our planet's history. Radiometric dating shows that Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old.”

Daniel put on the electronic Stephen Hawking voice, moving his hands like a robot. “Radio dating. Shows that the Earth. Is 4.54 billion years old.”

The boys laughed.

“You're such a freak, Ethan,” Will said. He and the other boys walked away.

Ethan climbed back up the stone stairs of the museum. They were wrong. It wasn't called radio dating. And he wasn't a freak. The foyer was full of people, moving in and out of exhibitions, collecting their tickets, buying toy snakes and bendy souvenir pencils. Nobody stopped to look at the dinosaur and Ethan felt sorry for it. Lonely, stuck up there, suspended by wires. Only one here of its kind. He wanted to tell the Tyrannosaurus Rex that he understood how it felt to be alone. He wanted to ask it what the stars looked like when it was still alive.

The dinosaur nodded. Ethan blinked—it looked like it really moved. Its skeleton arm reached across the foyer and the wires started to swing. Maybe the Tyrannosaurus Rex wanted to shake his hand. The dinosaur tilted its head and opened its jaw like it was about to say something, but no sound came from its sharp-toothed mouth. Ethan looked down at the crowd. Nobody else at the museum entrance noticed that the dinosaur's bones had come back to life.

“Ethan Forsythe,” Mr. Thompson called out. “Stop wandering off. The bus is here.”

The Tyrannosaurus Rex stopped moving. Ethan swung his backpack over his shoulder and joined the class. As they walked out onto College Street, he squinted into the afternoon light. It was one of those clear Sydney days, sun bouncing off buildings, windows glinting bright and blue. The children pushed and shoved, trying to get the best seats on the bus. Daniel, Will, and his new friends sat at the back and threw soggy paper at the girls in front. Ethan took a seat near the middle of the bus and waited for somebody to sit beside him. Face after face passed, but the seat next to Ethan remained empty.

When they arrived back at school, he saw his mum waiting for him near the front gate. She was by herself again. Sometimes Ethan wished she'd talk more to the other parents, try to make a friend. He watched her stretch her leg like she was warming up. In old photographs—back when she'd been a professional ballerina—his mum looked like someone else. She held her head higher, bones in her face were more prominent, and something was different behind her eyes. Mum waved at the bus window. With one shrinking hand, Ethan waved back. It was a secret wave—opening and closing his hand quickly—as he didn't want anybody else to think it was for them.

Ethan was last off the school bus, hoping that Will, Daniel, and the rest of them would finally leave him alone. He negotiated his way through the afternoon swarm of parents. How much kids in his class resembled their mums and dads was something Ethan often thought about—he wanted to figure out where each gene came from and where it'd landed. Ethan didn't look exactly like his mum, although they had similar eyes. But he was dark and his mum was fair; she was slight and he was sinewy.

“Mum, do you remember when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima?” Ethan stood beside her. He was as tall as her chin now, but being adult-sized like his mum still seemed impossible.

She laughed. “How old do you think I am? That happened a very long time before I was born.”

“Oh, yeah.” Ethan looked at her face. He couldn't imagine her being born; Mum had always been a grown-up. It was strange to think that she'd been twelve like him—that his mum had grown and developed, changed and aged. Luckily, no bombs had fallen on her. Ethan thought again about Kengo Nikawa and his pocket watch.

“Mum, do you think we care about time when we die?”

His mum made a face, the one she made when she was having a serious thought. “No, I don't think so. You'd stop noticing it. You'd be dead. When you die, time doesn't matter anymore.” They stood at the traffic lights, waiting to cross the street. “You okay?”

Ethan nodded.

He looked over the horizon at the grenadine sky. They lived under the flight path and he could hear another jet engine bellow overhead. Above Sydney, plane after plane flew past, leaving streaks of white vapor in the dry evening air.

T
HE SHOCK OF THE TURBULENCE
woke Mark. The “Fasten Seatbelt” sign above his head flashed and beeped. Grit collected in the corners of his eyes and he rubbed his face. The angular shape of the plastic window had left a deep imprint in his cheek. He ran a finger over it—the pink groove felt hot and tender—knowing at least this wasn't permanent like ugly scars that lived elsewhere on his skin.

He stretched his arms; his shoulders felt stiff. It was only a five-hour flight, but there'd also been the drive to Perth from Kalgoorlie, near the mine where Mark lived and worked. And in the claustrophobic hull of an airplane, time behaved differently. It stretched and distended, every minute counted impatiently by every passenger.

Before last week, Mark hadn't spoken to Tom for six years. Hearing his brother on the phone jolted him back to their childhood: the two boys laughing as they hid from their mother under the orange Formica kitchen table; talking until they fell asleep as they lay beside each other under the stars on family camping trips; yelling at each other as teenagers, fighting over the stereo. The sound of Tom's voice shot through Mark's nervous system, rushing along every fiber and cell.

“Mark,” he said. “It's me. Tom.”

“Hey.” Mark paused. “Yeah, I know.”

“Listen, Dad's dying. Cancer.” Tom's breathing was heavy on the other side of the line. “You should probably come home to Sydney.”

Mark had chosen a seat at the back of the plane. Luckily, the flight was reasonably empty and nobody sat beside him. He didn't want to talk, answer questions about his life in Western Australia or explain why he was coming back to Sydney. A boy across the aisle, perhaps around fourteen or fifteen years old, looked up from the game on his tablet for a moment and smiled at Mark. Mark smiled back, but the corners of his mouth labored over the movement. He didn't know how to interact with children. And this boy wasn't a child anymore. It didn't feel like long ago that Mark was that age, his whole life ahead of him, his future bright. The boy returned to his game.

Mark looked out the window at the darkening blue air. The altitude made him feel queasy. They were flying over the South Eastern Highlands of New South Wales now, across the Great Dividing Range, as the plane approached the sandstone cliffs on the edge of the Sydney Basin.

Western Australia had been salve for Mark: its different air, its alien light, a sun that set behind the water instead of rising from it. Over there he lived under another sky. In Sydney, it felt like the city and sky both grew from the ground. Space wasn't infinite here—it had a limit, a lid—but it was the opposite out west. Everything was open and endless; the wide land seemed to hang from the wider stars. There was nothing familiar in Kalgoorlie to anchor him. He lived a new life on a new planet.

Mark adjusted his seat belt. The plane rocked over pockets of air. He was calm through the turbulence, understood the science of it: the way differences in atmospheric heating caused jet streams, the meeting of bodies of air moving at wildly different speeds. The wings rattled; the fuselage dropped. They descended farther, breaking the clouds. Now he could see the sparkle of the Pacific Ocean as the plane tilted, turning toward the city.

At Kingsford Smith's arrival terminal, nobody was waiting to meet him. No open arms would greet him at the gate. He'd collect his bags from the conveyor belt and wheel them out into the staring faces. Other people would have joyful reunions. Couples would kiss; children would run to their parents and hold them tight. But Mark would make the lonely journey into the city by himself.

As the plane plunged toward the airport, Mark's stomach jumped. He caught his first glimpse of the city that used to be his home. Tarmac swelled below them; the runway glowed neon orange and red. Sydney's lights quivered in the distance as he stared out the tiny window of this soaring machine piloting him straight into his past.

Ω

IF ETHAN'S HANDS COULD LIE,
they wouldn't hurt so much. Knuckles not scraped raw, no tiny scratches nestled between each ridge of his joints. But the ache in his bones told the truth. Last year, he'd memorized the names of all the bones in the body. The eight carpal bones of the hand were collectively known as the carpus: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, hamate, capitate, trapezoid, trapezium. They sounded like a circus. Ethan studied his fingers and nails, the groove of his palms, the swirls of his fingertips. He knew he had his father's hands.

Ethan had no memories of his father. He'd left when Ethan was a baby. One crushed photograph, found at the back of his mum's wardrobe, was the only picture he'd ever seen. In the photo, Ethan was a newborn. His father was giving him a bath, looking down, his splayed hand holding the back of the baby's head. At that angle, Ethan couldn't see the color of his father's eyes or the details of his face. His hair was dark, dark hairs ran along his arm. But Ethan could see his hands. Long thin fingers, broad palms, wide fingernails and big thumbs. As Ethan grew, he noticed his own hands become those other hands. He kept the photo of his father hidden in the drawer of his bedside table. This man had made him—pieced him together from his genes and cells—but he was a stranger.

Although Ethan didn't remember his father, there were a handful of things he knew about him. He'd collected them over the years—small details from his birth certificate, fragments of overheard conversations. It was exactly a handful because there were only five things, a tiny snatch of information. Ethan knew these things like the back of his hand; they were all he had to hold on to of the father who'd disappeared from his life.

On his thumb, Ethan knew that his parents were married on January 13. On his index finger, he knew that his father's birthday was October 14, and on his middle finger Ethan knew that when he was born, his father was a student. These were all written on his birth certificate. On the next finger, Ethan counted the black hair he'd seen in the photograph, and on his pinkie was his father's name: Mark Hall. But it was only a handful. The questions Ethan still had about his father could have filled up all the fingers on all the hands of everyone in the universe.

Ω

THE YEAR 6 BOYS
had been playing tag in the playground at lunch. Their sneakers squeaked as they dodged the younger kids, knocking over lunch boxes and drink bottles. “You're it!” they yelled at one another. Ethan watched from the seats underneath the shaded area—he'd forgotten his hat that day and wasn't allowed in the sun. It didn't really bother him though. He had his copy of
A Brief History of Time
to read and he got sunburned easily.

A Brief History of Time
was his favorite book; he'd already read it five times. Ethan stared at Stephen Hawking's diagram of what would happen if the sun died. The future light cone of the dying sun was a big triangle, pouring out liters of time. Stephen Hawking said that if the sun stopped shining right now, we wouldn't know on Earth until eight minutes after it'd happened. Maybe the sun had already exploded, sucking up all of our solar system, and we only had eight more minutes to live. He glanced back up at the boys across the playground. They'd have no idea they were about to die because of the collapsing sun.

“Hey, freak,” Daniel shouted. “Stop staring.”

Ethan buried his face back in
A Brief History of Time
.

A shadow fell across the page as Daniel stood over him. He knocked the book out of Ethan's hands. “Guess you can't pick that up from your wheelchair, can you, Stephen Hawking?”

“Obviously, I don't have motor neurone disease,” Ethan said.

“Obviously. Don't. Have. Motor. Neurone. Disease.” Daniel mimicked Stephen Hawking's digital voice again.

Ethan tilted his head. “But that's how you'd sound if you did have it. Because you wouldn't—”

Daniel kicked the book farther away. Other Year 6 boys gathered around them now: Nathan Nguyen; the twins, Harry and Hank; Ramesh from Bangladesh, who everyone called Ram. Ethan saw Will out of the corner of his eye.