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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 Godel, 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 Godel stopped eating. I told Davis how even though Godel 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 Godel, 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.
"Do you mind turning around?" I asked him. He turned toward the dimly lit terrarium, where the billionaire-in-waiting was hiding somewhere in her artificial forest.
I wriggled out of my jeans and pulled off my shirt. I felt naked even though technically I wasn't, but I dropped my hands to my sides and said, "Okay, you can look." I slid into the warmth of the pool next to him; he put his hands on my waist under the water, but didn't try to kiss me.
The terrarium was behind him, and now that my eyes were fully adjusted to the dark I could see the tuatara on a branch, staring at us through one of her redblack eyes. "Tua's watching us," I said.
"She's such a perv," Davis answered, and then turned to look at the animal. Her green skin had some kind of yellow moss growing on it, and I could see her teeth as she breathed with her mouth slightly open. Her miniature crocodile tail flickered suddenly, and Davis startled, curling into me, then laughed. "I hate that thing," he said.
--
It was freezing when we got out. We didn't have any towels, so we carried our clothes in our arms and ran back to the house. Noah was still on the couch playing the same game. I hustled past him and jogged up the marble stairs.
Once we were dressed, we went to Davis's bedroom. He put the Iron Man on his bedside table, then knelt down to show me how his telescope worked. He plugged some coordinates into a remote control, and the telescope moved itself. When it stopped, Davis stooped to look through the lens, then cleared the way for me.
"That's Tau Ceti," he said. The way the telescope was zoomed in, I couldn't see anything but darkness and one jittering disk of white light. "Twelve light-years away, similar to our sun but a little smaller. Two of its planets actually might be habitable--probably not, but maybe. It's my favorite star." I didn't know what I was supposed to be seeing--it was just a circle like any other. But then he explained.
"I like to look at it and think about how the sun's light looks to someone in Tau Ceti's solar system. Right now, they're seeing our light from twelve years ago--in the light they're seeing, my mom has three years to live. This house has just been built, and Mom and Dad are always fighting about the layout of the kitchen. In the light they see, you and I are just kids. We've got the best and the worst of it in front of us."
"We still have the best and the worst of it in front of us," I said.
"I hope not," he said. "I sure as hell hope the worst is behind me."
I pulled away from Tau Ceti's twelve-year-old light and looked up at Davis. I took his hand, and part of me wanted to tell him I loved him, but I wasn't sure if I really did. Our hearts were broken in the same places. That's something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.
