Part 31 (1/2)

”We can wait,” she said. ”We'll just sit here. We don't have to turn it over at all. n.o.body will ever know.”

We sat in silence for a long time. I told her later that I wanted to stay there forever, our futures vibrating in the midpoint between knowing and not knowing, the moment stretched to fill a lifetime. Would that have been a state of order? Knowing either way is a switch flipped to either side. But what if you refuse to touch it? Is that order or chaos?

History has turning points, moments around which pivot the events that follow. I sometimes imagine it to be a railroad switch that shunts a train from one path to another. Sometimes it's just a big pop, a whack of a stick and the pinata shatters and the candy pours out.

I don't know when this moment happened. It might be when Maggie and I looked at our certificates together and she started crying and I put my arm around her. That's when my life changed, because instead of warmth of closeness, I wanted to crawl away, the click of a cog, the next step. It sank into me, a realization made suddenly clear, a contrast from the moments that filled up our lives before. We weren't kids anymore, and we weren't going to be together forever. A teenager's mind isn't ready for that.

I pulled HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE. I already knew what that was, but I had to explain it to Maggie. I started to explain it to her to distract her from what she had pulled, because it was also pretty unique. My valiant efforts didn't work. Three days later and we were sitting on her bed with her parents downstairs worrying and worrying, filling the house with the sickly smell of anxiety. After all these years of having the blood readings, people were still slaves to it. Stephen Hawking would say that we're slaves to order, but it seemed pretty chaotic at Maggie's house.

Maggie was worried and weepy. I couldn't blame her. CANCER or PLANE CRASH or HEART ATTACK were what you expected to pull, and those are things you can deal with. They seem distant and unreal, like life was before we had the machine and its holograms and red-dyed paper and you knew that because your grandparents both died of heart attacks that you were p.r.o.ne to that, too. The machine gave us more order, but it didn't really take away the chaos.

”It means I'm going to live for a really long time,” I said. ”I don't think anybody else has pulled that. At least n.o.body I know of. I guess it's kind of a big deal.”

”I've never heard of it,” she said.

I shrugged. ”It's when all the heat in the universe dies, right? Atoms stop spinning. It'll be really cold. It's all kind of theoretical, though. Well, it was.”

”How long will you live?”

I was embarra.s.sed-she was envious of me. I expected a lot of people would be. I didn't see what the big deal was, though. The woman I loved had pulled NUCLEAR BOMB.

”It's about ten centillion years away,” I said. ”I looked it up.”

”Is that a real number?”

”Yeah. It's ten with a hundred zeroes behind it.”

”How could somebody live that long?”

I shook my head and stared at my feet. ”I can't even imagine.”

Her hands were trembling. She ran her fingers through her hair and clutched her stomach. She was crying again.

”Other people will pull NUCLEAR BOMB,” she said. ”They have to. A nuclear bomb doesn't kill just one person.”

”You have to stop obsessing about it,” I said, quietly. ”It's not helping anything.”

”How can I not think about it?” she said. I couldn't believe she still had enough water in her to cry again, but she did. She cupped her hands over her face. I hated seeing her so sad.

”You can't do this, Maggie,” I said. ”You just can't.”

”We have to tell somebody about it,” she said. ”This is something everybody needs to know.”

”I don't think that's a good idea,” I said.

”But what if-”

”You can't think about what-ifs. You have to think about school and graduating, okay? If it's a problem, somebody else will pull it. You know that's true. If there's going to be a nuclear bomb, then other people will get it. Just like September 11.”

”That happened because people didn't talk about what they got!”

”Do you think that would have helped? If they had told people what they got, then how do you know it wouldn't have happened anyway? It had to happen, Maggie. That's what they pulled.”

”Don't you think it's weird that n.o.body told anybody else what they got?”She was starting to raise her voice. I didn't want that to be our first argument.

I put my hand on her knee.

”Don't tell me you believe that stuff,” I said. ”Just because some guys on YouTube say it's a conspiracy doesn't mean it is.”

”Have you watched it?”

”No,” I said. ”But I read about it. Look, Maggie, that's silly. There were thousands of people there. How would the government get them all to work at the same building? Or to fly on the same plane?”

”The people in the Pentagon pulled MISSILE,” she said. ”It's true.”

”That's just a rumor. It's an urban legend. Stop it, Maggie.”

”I'm scared,” she said, her anger melting into convulsing sobs.

I put my arm over her shoulder and hugged her close to me.

After September 11, Stephen Hawking didn't comment on the conspiracy, because n.o.body had really thought about it. In a letter to the New York Times, he said that order was winning, even though it seemed like it wasn't. War and terrorism are agents of chaos, he said, but the Western world was the bastion of order, and that we would win. Bringing peace and democracy was just another way of bringing order. We were more powerful. We would win, and the Middle East would be quiet and peaceful, eventually. The American military was the ice cube. I thought about that a lot.

It was all over the news within a few days. Other people had pulled NUCLEAR BOMB and went public with it, but not Maggie. Her parents were pretty down on the government, and went to war protests and things, and they were worried about what they would do with the information. They didn't want their daughter to be put through the wringer of the Patriot Act, which is what a lot of people were expecting.

Since it was illegal to get your blood read before you were 18, and n.o.body older than that had pulled the nuke, everybody just a.s.sumed it was going to happen much later, decades down the road, when all fifteen people who had pulled the nuke just happened to be in the same place at the same time where a nuclear bomb would go off.

I didn't talk much about what I had pulled because it was so strange. It seemed so weird that somebody would live so long. It was crazy to even consider, but I was thinking about that a lot at the time, and thinking about how if you pull something it's pretty likely to happen.

Within a few weeks, the FBI was all over our town. They were all over other towns, too, like spiders, building webs between the Nuclear Kids, as the NUCLEAR BOMB pullers were being called by the press. The FBI interviewed me, and asked me politely to see my cert, which I did, because I didn't want to cause trouble. There were two agents, a man and a woman. They seemed young, too young to be carrying guns around. The man saw my cert and scrunched his nose up and showed the woman, and she shook her head.

”What does that mean?” she said, to me. I shrugged.

”I'm not sure,” I said. It was kind of a lie.

”Have you told anybody else?”

”Just my girlfriend. My parents don't know.”

”Why didn't you tell your parents?”

”I didn't want them to worry.”

”Then you do do know what this means,” she said, pointing to the cert in her hand. know what this means,” she said, pointing to the cert in her hand.

”I sort of do,” I said. ”It's when all the heat in the universe dies. It's sort of the end of the universe, I guess.”

”That can't be real,” she said, to me, as if I were lying to her.

”That's what it says,” I said. ”It's never wrong, is it?”