The Measures Between Us (7 page)

After a few weeks of getting caught, Cynthia figured out how to sneak closer. They parked the car on the shoulder of the closest township road and hiked three quarters of a mile through dense forest owned by a hunting club. Why Kingman didn't own this piece of land as well was a mystery to Jack. Maybe the hunters had refused his offers, no matter how inflated, out of defiance.

At the beginning Jack thought she was fascinated because she wanted to be in the chopper, see the land and houses from up there. The tops of trees, roofs of houses, all eighteen holes of a serpentining golf course, everything scaled down. But once when he said, “We could probably find somewhere to take a helicopter ride,” she responded: “Why would we do that?” He liked how much she could surprise him. Early on he was frustrated that he couldn't read what she wanted, but quickly, once he realized she
didn't mind, he started to savor these moments. They could be close and still be two totally different people.

She borrowed aviation books from the library and ordered subscriptions to helicopter magazines, cutting out pictures of the models she liked best and tacking them to her wall. She learned the names of Kingman's—there were two—and told Jack which machine was which. She paid such close attention that on quiet days she could recognize the nuances of their sounds long before they emerged into view. There was no schedule to his flights, and on many days they saw nothing. They would loiter for an hour or two, smoking cigarettes and staring at the sky, waiting for something that never came.

“What if he's running a huge meth lab?” Jack said once. “Maybe he's gone all Hells Angel.” Cynthia shook her head, smiling, knowing this was an absurd scenario. So did Jack, yet it was amusing to imagine the science whiz Kingman—slight and dressed perpetually in khaki pants and a white button-down shirt—mixed up with bikers and drug addicts. Standing among each other, they would look like different species, occupying the same earth only accidentally.

“I'm sure he's doing something we don't even know how to describe,” she said. “People like him live in a whole different world.”

“He's just got tons more money than anyone else. He's probably not all that different.”

“I know, but he can afford to get obsessed with whatever he wants.”

Aside from witnessing him board and exit his helicopter, Jack saw him only a single time. Jack was stopped at a traffic light in town, and a Range Rover with tinted windows pulled next to
him. One of the back windows rolled down, and there was Kingman, sticking his right hand out the window and shaking it, as if trying to loosen something he didn't want touching his skin. The glass quickly rolled back up, and Jack inched forward to see who was driving, curious to know if it was one of the security guards who had chased him and Cynthia away. He couldn't tell. With their dark sunglasses and close-cropped mustaches, they all looked the same.

There was a rumor that the driver's ed teacher at school used to work for Kingman, and that he was forbidden to talk about him because Kingman made all his employees, down to the gardeners and trash collectors, sign nondisclosure agreements. Cynthia was one of the only students to fail the course and have to take it twice. Still, the instructor never told her anything, despite her persistent questions.

Jack liked watching the helicopter fly in at dusk, when the blue and red lights were blinking. He could pick it up sooner then, the blips approaching the landing pad, a cement church key set in the grass, weeds blunting the edges. They should solder lights to the blades, he thought, let them slice around against the darkening sky.

Usually there were people with Kingman in addition to the pilot, and they would exit the chopper while the blades still revolved. The pilot remained inside the cockpit, behind the instruments. Occasionally it was just Kingman alone, in a smaller helicopter whose cockpit was a glass bulb.

“Where do you think he goes?” Cynthia asked, staring through binoculars.

Jack shrugged. “Boston, maybe.”

“Why there?”

“It's the closest big city. He probably meets with businessmen, or with people he knows from MIT.”

“He seems like maybe he doesn't want to talk to anyone.”

“Why do you think that?” Jack asked.

“Don't know,” Cynthia said. “Why else hide in the middle of all this land?”

“Maybe he doesn't think of it like hiding.”

Often Kingman looked toward the fence where the two of them were standing, as if he sensed someone was watching him. Yet they were far enough away that their bodies wouldn't have registered as anything other than fence posts or tree stumps, maybe wandering deer. Still, they tried to stand as motionless as possible.

Sometimes Jack thought he and Cynthia might be interested in Kingman for different reasons. Jack wanted to know about all those boxes, the information they were collecting, all the secret projects he was funding. Cynthia, though, seemed like she might actually want to be the millionaire. Slip through the fence and have that big house and all those acres to herself.

Field Notes

Data Entry: Jack C.

Historical Crests for the Sparhawk River at Grover's Crossing

(1) 25.37 ft. (est.) on Jun. 28, 2006

(2) 25.02 ft. (est.) on Jul. 16, 2007

(3) 23.32 ft. (est) on Jun. 16, 2006

(4) 22.12 ft. (est) on May 28, 1999

(5) 21.76 ft. (est) on Aug. 18, 2001

(6) 21.00 ft on Jun. 19, 2004

(7) 17.98 ft. on Apr. 3, 2005

(8) 17.33 ft. on Sept. 18, 2004

(9) 16.31 ft. on Jan. 19, 1996

(10) 14.84 ft. on Jan. 9, 1979

(11) 13.42 ft. on Mar. 15, 1986

(12) 13.19 ft. on Feb. 12, 1981

(13) 12.03 ft. on Dec. 2, 1996

(14) 11.49 ft. on Mar. 14, 1997

(15) 11.28 ft. on Nov. 9, 1996

FLOOD IMPACTS

21 ft. (major): Maximum possible reading on river gauge

16 ft. (major): Wilson's Supermarket parking lot begins to flood

13 ft. (moderate): Bank parking lot begins to flood

12 ft. (moderate): Some low-lying homes north of the Pike bridge begin to flood

11 ft. (minor): River gauge switches from daily readings to hourly

10 ft. (watch): FEMA alerted

8 ft.: Mean temperature of water decreases/increases by greater than 2 degrees per 12-hour block

The lab for the climate component of the flood study was in the basement of a nondescript building on the northern edge of the campus. Jack did most of his work far from this warren, on the psychology floor of the humanities library, where he would sit in a carrel, slip headphones on, and transcribe interviews. But as part of his internship orientation he was shown the lab and given a key.

He went there occasionally, mostly to pick up or drop off his data sheets, and he was always mesmerized. Bisecting the room was a scale model of a twenty-mile stretch of the river, topographically faithful to the actual one. It had ridges and divots, deep pools and shallow, random reefs. There were skinny islands scrubby with bunchgrass, some no longer than a pinkie. It was filled with water, too, and you could control the current. Etched on the bottom were the names of towns and hamlets and the mile markers they cut through. Just as with the real river, a highway ran along the eastern side, high above the forest. The model makers had even carved the trees and shrubs that jutted from the banks, as
well as glued miniature structures to simulate houses and barns and garages. These were meant to stand in for the homes of the people who lived along the water, whose voices Jack had come to know through the recordings he was always pausing and rewinding to get exactly right. Some of them drifted uninvited into his head just before he fell asleep, stubborn and momentary as a song.

A long rectangular vitrine took up most of another corner of the lab. This was a weather simulator, with intricate sensors to measure rainfall, wind speed, barometric pressure. Banks of light bulbs along the top rim could re-create all manner of sunlight and moonlight, cloud cover and blue skies. They could make it snow, even, and during his orientation tour, the lab assistant said, “Watch,” before hitting a combination of buttons that caused an eclipse followed by a snowstorm that turned the glass box into a squall of white in an instant. “Now he's just showing off,” said the supervisor who was guiding Jack around. “Wait,” added the assistant, “I can do a hurricane too.”

Midsummer, weeks before the fair, Jack took Cynthia to the lab one night. He knew roughly when people would be there and he waited until it was late enough to be empty. The graduate students kept long hours, scattered around the lab with clipboards, but no one stayed too deep into the evening. If anyone wondered why he was there, he could always say he had come for more data sheets. He knew which filing cabinet they were kept in.

When they walked in and he flipped the lights on, she paused, then rushed right up to the model of the river. “Holy shit,” she said. “I can't believe you haven't brought me here before.” She submerged her hand into the water, waved it around, splashed a miniature arbor on the western bank. “Clearer than the real one, I guess.”

“No mud,” said Jack.

“I guess they didn't want it exactly the same?” Cynthia said.

Jack showed her the carefully stamped town names crawling up the sides and the elbow bends at mile fourteen and mile nineteen. At mile five was a one-lane bridge, its pilings and guardrails molded from spray-painted Styrofoam. The sign warning of its height restriction—eight feet—was there as well. “They had set builders from the film school make this whole thing,” he said.

Cynthia walked one side, then the other. Town to town she wandered, peering at the houses and trailing a finger through the water. Occasionally she buried both her hands to her wrists. “We should put some fish in it,” she said.

Jack laughed. “When I'm ready to quit, maybe.”

“Oh, come on,” she said, smiling. “They'll never know it was us. And how fun would that be to come in here some morning expecting the same old thing and see pet-store fish swimming up and down? We could get the neon kind.”

She took her hand out of the water, dried it on her jeans, and went to the vitrine. “What's this?” she asked.

Jack joined her. “Weather simulator,” he said. “They can make a typhoon if they want.”

“Really?”

He pointed to the control panel, padlocked. “Those buttons and dials, there are specific combinations for all these different conditions. Whatever you can dream up, they can do.”

“Blizzards?” Cynthia asked.

Jack nodded.

“Funnel cloud?”

“Anything,” Jack said. “It's like magic.”

“I want to move here,” she said. “The professors won't care, right?”

Tacked to the walls were maps and pie charts and bar graphs littered with pushpins. Geological surveys revealed the strata beneath the ground, while images from satellites gave long-range views.

“So this is where the data you collect goes,” Cynthia said. “Do you know what all this means?” She focused on two red and green axes overlaid on an old black-and-white photograph.

“No,” Jack said.

“It must mean a lot, though.”

“Why do you say that?”

She was back at the indoor river now, on the northern terminus. “I don't know, so many numbers and patterns. It must add up to something. Do the heads of the study know?”

“They're only just in the middle of it. It's supposed to go on for several more years.”

“Really? Years?”

Jack nodded. “They say that's the only way to come up with a full enough picture.”

“Of what, though?”

“The weather,” Jack shrugged. “The people—it's part psychological and part scientific.” He thought of the questions and answers he listened to in the library, the stories of strangers along the rising river.

“What if they don't find anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if they just end up back where they started, with a lot more science but no answers about what it all adds up to?”

“I guess they'll keep going, then.”

“What if they can't wait?”

Cynthia had circled to one end of the river while Jack stood opposite her. He had known she would like it here, this random
room with a whole alternate world inside. All over campus and all over town people were walking around oblivious. They didn't know you could fit a waterway into a lab, didn't know there was a mad scientist conjuring up cold snaps and droughts. He was happy to see her so excited, since she could be so remote sometimes. And it was a different sort of detachment than he remembered from high school. Back then she drifted in and out of her own head, but rarely with Jack, who was proud to be one of the few people she was close to. She was different now, though, and he couldn't tell whether it was only because they were getting close again after years apart or whether it was something more.

“Let's get those moviemakers to build us something,” Cynthia said.

“Like what?”

“I don't know, but I'd like my own river, in my basement. My dad could rig up something to let just enough rain in, some piping through a window. He even has ducks ready to float up and down it.”

“We can bribe them,” Jack said.

“The ducks?”

“The set builders,” he said with a laugh.

“What do they like? Maybe they just like building shit. If I could build this stuff, you wouldn't have to pay me a cent. My parents could come up to my room and they'd be amazed at what I'd been doing all that time.”

Cynthia walked toward Jack, skimming the water with her hand. He didn't want to leave yet and he hoped she didn't, either. What if they stayed all night, he wondered, lay down and dreamed up valleys, mountains, oceans, lightning storms that froze the sky. “Twenty miles in a few seconds,” she said when she got to
him. “I bet you never knew I could walk so fast.” Again she dried her hand on her pants, then gently palmed his shoulder. “Thank you for bringing me here.”