Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

“Yeah, I promise.”

“And we break hearts, but we don’t break promises,” she said.

“You say that’s your ‘motto,’ but you spend ninety-nine percent of your time with Mychal now.”

“Except right now I’m hanging out with you and Jar Jar Binks,” she said.

We went back to watching the movie. As it ended, she squeezed my arm and said, “I love you,” then raced off to Mychal’s place.

SEVENTEEN

LATER THAT NIGHT, I got a text from Davis.

Him: You around?

Me: I am. You want to facetime?

Him: Could I possibly see you irl?

Me: I guess, but I’m less fun irl.

Him: I like you irl. Is now good?

Me: Now’s good.

Him: Dress warm. It’s cold out, and the sky is clear.

—

Harold and I drove over to the Pickett compound. He’s not much for cold weather, and it seemed to me I could hear something in his engine tightening up, but he held it together for me, that blessed car.

The walk from the driveway to Davis’s house was frigid, even in my winter coat and mittens. You never think much about weather when it’s good, but once it gets cold enough to see your breath, you can’t ignore it. The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around.

As I approached, the front door opened for me. Davis was sitting on the couch next to Noah, playing their usual starfighter video game. “Hi,” I said.

“Hey,” Davis said.

“’Sup,” Noah added.

“Listen, bud,” Davis said as he stood up. “I’m gonna go for a walk with Aza before she debundles. Back in a bit, cool?” He reached over and mussed Noah’s hair.

“Cool,” Noah said.

—

“I read Daisy’s stories,” I told him as we walked. The grass of the golf course was still cut perfectly short, even though the only golfer in the family had now been missing for months.

“They’re pretty good, right?”

“I guess. I was distracted by how terrible Ayala is.”

“She’s not all bad. Just anxious.”

“She causes one hundred percent of the problems in the stories.”

He nudged his shoulder against me sweetly. “I kind of liked her, but I guess I’m biased.”

—

We walked around the whole property until we eventually stopped at the pool. Davis tapped a button on his phone and the pool cover rolled away. We sat down on lounge chairs next to each other, and I watched the water from the pool steam into the cold air as Davis lay back to look up at the sky. “I don’t understand why he’s so stuck inside himself, when there is this endlessness to fall into.”

“Who is?”

“Noah.” I noticed he’d reached into his coat pocket. He pulled something out and twirled it in his palm. At first, I thought it might be a pen, but then as he moved it rhythmically through his fingers, like a magician playing with cards, I realized it was the Iron Man. “Don’t judge me,” he said. “It’s been a bad week.”

“I just don’t think Iron Man is much of a superh—”

“You’re breaking my heart, Aza. So, you see Saturn up there?” Using his Iron Man as a pointer, he told me how you can tell the difference between a planet and a star, and where different constellations were. And he told me that our galaxy was a big spiral, and that a lot of galaxies were. “Every star we can see right now is in that spiral. It’s huge.”

“Does it have a center?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, the whole galaxy is rotating around this supermassive black hole. But very slowly. I mean, it takes our solar system like two hundred twenty-five million Earth years to orbit the galaxy.”

I asked him if the spirals of the galaxy were infinite, and he said no, and then he asked about my spirals.

I told him about this mathematician Kurt Gödel, who had this really bad fear of being poisoned, so much so that he couldn’t bring himself to eat food unless it was prepared by his wife. And then one day his wife got sick and had to go into the hospital, so Gödel stopped eating. I told Davis how even though Gödel must’ve known that starvation was a greater risk than poisoning, he just couldn’t eat, and so he starved to death. At seventy-one. He cohabitated with the demon for seventy-one years, and then it got him in the end.

When I’d finished the story, he asked, “Do you worry that will happen to you?”

And I said, “It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can’t be sure, you know? If you’re Gödel, you just can’t be sure your food isn’t poisoned.”

“Do you worry that will happen to you?” he asked again.

“I worry about a lot of things.”

We kept on talking, for so long that the stars moved above us, until eventually he asked, “Wanna swim?”

“Bit cold,” I said.

“Pool’s heated,” he answered. He stood up and pulled off his shirt, then kicked out of his jeans while I watched. I liked watching him take off his jeans. He was skinny, but I liked his body—the small but sinewy muscles in his back, his goose-bumped legs. Shivering, he jumped into the water. “Magnificent,” he said.

“I don’t have a bathing suit.”

“Well, if you have a bra and underwear that’s basically a bikini.” I laughed and took off my coat, then stood up.