Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

“Well, it’s not working. I always hang out in mansions with hidden movie theaters.”

“Want to watch something? Or we could go for a walk? There’s something I want to show you outside.”

“We shouldn’t abandon Daisy and Mychal.”

“I’ll let them know.” He fiddled around on his phone for a second and then spoke into it. “We’re going for a walk. Make yourselves at home. Theater’s in the basement if you’re interested.”

A moment later, his voice began playing over the speakers, repeating what he’d just said. “I could’ve just texted her,” I said.

“Yeah, but that wouldn’t have been as awesome.”

—

I zipped up my hoodie and followed Davis outside. We walked in silence down one of the asphalt golf paths, past the pool, which was lit from inside the water, slowly changing colors from red to orange to yellow to green. The light cast an eerie glow up onto the windows of the terrarium that reminded me of pictures of the northern lights.

We kept walking until we reached one of the oblong sand bunkers of the golf course. Davis lay down inside of it, his head resting on its grassy lip. I lay down next to him, our jackets touching without our skin touching. He pointed up at the sky and said, “So the light pollution is terrible, but the brightest star you see—there, see it?” I nodded. “That’s not a star. That’s Jupiter. But Jupiter is, like, depending on orbits and stuff, between three hundred sixty and six hundred seventy million miles away. Right now, it’s around five hundred million miles, which is around forty-five light-minutes. You know what light-time is?”

“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.