To Finity and Beyond

To Finity and Beyond

Long long ago in an America far far away, I attended public school in the state of Kansas. We pledged allegiance in class, and because good citizens obeyed the law, we officially did not pray there. God was in His heaven and the Kansas school system was not a punchline.

I liked prayer. I liked imagining myself inside the Lord’s prayer, sitting in green pastures beside the still waters, tiptoeing through the valley of the shadow of death. I loved my miraculous God who’d made us secretly immortal and Jesus so handsome, and while He loved all His children beyond measure, I knew He loved me more. At night I’d watch the Milky Way pass over our house, our small town, our flat state. To an 8-year-old girl, the sight was a glimpse of Heaven, a portion left frayed and unfinished so we could see it and remember our eternal home. When I pulled up the covers, I prayed to be perfect, and to be beautiful when I grew up. I asked God to forgive everyone, especially children and people who lived before Jesus or missionaries.

I was a prayer criminal. I prayed at school: to be a genius, to be able to whistle. I prayed after tests. (Prayer during a test was cheating, but God could correct my answers.) I accepted my inevitable martyrdom. If I was burned at the stake, I wouldn’t cry. When I went to heaven I would talk to Leonardo da Vinci and Eve, and there would be time enough to learn everything.

Naturally I prayed in my head. My teachers lived on paper-bag lunches and good old hard water from the drinking fountain, just like the pioneers. They wore armor-plated foundation garments under their starched dresses and heavy cardigans. They patrolled the halls like beneficent aircraft carriers and frog-marched troublemakers straight to the principal’s office.

It was playground gospel that the principal kept an electric paddle in his desk.

One October Friday, we learned about atoms. Imagine! I was made of miniature solar systems! Also atoms were democratic. Parents and principals? Just atoms. At the atomic level, we were all equal. I could feel my skin atoms spin faster in excitement.

“How come we don’t get dizzy?” I asked.

“We don’t feel the earth spinning, do we?” said Mrs. Seitz. “The difference between an atom and you is much greater than the difference between you and the earth. You can’t see atoms even with a microscope.”

Fine with me. I’d prayed to see red blood cells and amoebas with the school microscopes. Despite prayer, knob twiddling, and thick glasses, I saw a big white nothing. Without my glasses, I could pray, twiddle, and jam my eyeball against the lens. I only ever saw eyelashes.

That night, my atoms stayed up late. I decided infinite and eternal simply meant very very very times a billion zillions. Good. Nobody would be in hell forever. The heavens were not Heaven. I was only a little disappointed. The Milky Way, every white, gold, and blue glimmer another sun, was better. It was here. I didn’t have to wait until I died to understand the atoms of my universe.

If I could wiggle my own atoms just right, I could walk through walls. I could live underwater, breathing the O without the H2. I could climb starlight. I would start small: I would teach my eyeball atoms to see other atoms.

The next morning, I put a glass of water in the freezer to slow down the molecules. I watched Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner for half an hour, then brought the glass to the kitchen table. I pulled up a chair, put my nose to the glass, and stared. Atoms! I took my glasses off. Still atoms! Adults thought they knew everything—did the scientists not even look? It couldn’t be that easy. It had to be molecules in the water. Still, molecules was pretty good for a first try.

Then my mother walked in. “What on earth—”

“I can see atoms!” I announced.

She laughed. “No you can’t. Nobody can.”

“Look!”

My mom, the only one in my family with normal vision, looked. My mom, 20 years away from her first pair of reading glasses, said, “I don’t see anything.”

So how could I see them? I was just a kid, I couldn’t explain every little detail. Didn’t moms know science? Maybe they didn’t have molecules when my mom was little. I shook the glass and held it to the light so she could see the blizzard of white molecules with her old-fashioned eyes.

“Those specks?” she said. “Those are minerals. We have hard water. That’s what hard water means.”

I was Wiley Coyote standing on air. Then came the slow whistling free fall from divine genius to ordinary kid.

“Not those!” I yelled—because nothing changes a lie to the truth like volume—and drank the evidence.

I ran to the sycamore tree in our front yard and climbed to my spot, a fork about halfway up with leaves enough to hide me and my tears. I didn’t want to be atoms. I didn’t want to be finite and a failure, and tell lies to be special. I wanted my shame to burn me to ashes so I could blow away.

After a while I climbed higher, into the sun, higher than any adult could go. Beyond the black-shingled rooftops, the fields were stubbled green with winter wheat. I knitted myself tightly in the whip-thin branches. Gravity doesn’t really care about atoms.

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Kat Meltzer writes and not-writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is old enough to know better and screw up anyway.

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