My brother smiles. He says the universe is like a dot-covered balloon that’s being blown up. The dots are the stars; they’re moving farther and farther away from one another all the time. He says that one of the really interesting questions is whether the universe is infinite and unbounded, or infinite but bounded, like the balloon idea. All I can think of in connection with a balloon is the explosion when it breaks. He says that space is mostly empty and that matter is not really solid. It’s just a bunch of widely spaced atoms moving at greater or lesser speeds. Anyway, matter and energy are aspects of each other. It’s as if everything is made of solid light. He says that if we knew enough we could walk through walls as if they were air, if we knew enough we could go faster than light, and at that point space would become time and time would become space and we would be able to travel through time, back into the past. This is the first of these ideas of his that has really interested me. I’d like to see dinosaurs and a good many other things, such as the Ancient Egyptians. On the other hand there’s something menacing about this notion. I’m not so sure I want to travel back into the past. I’m not so sure I want to be that impressed, either, by everything he says. It gives him too much of an advantage. Anyway it isn’t a sensible way to talk. A lot of it sounds like comic books, the kind with ray guns. So I say, “What good would that be?”
He smiles. “If you could do it, you’d know you could do it,” is what he says. I tell Cordelia that Stephen says we could walk through walls if we knew enough. This is the only one of his latest ideas I can trust myself to expound, at the moment. The rest are too complicated, or bizarre. Cordelia laughs. She says that Stephen is a brain and that if he weren’t so cute he’d be a pill. Stephen has a summer job this summer, teaching canoeing at a boys’ camp, but I don’t, because I’m only thirteen. I go with my parents up to the north, near Sault Ste. Marie, where my father is overseeing an experimental colony of tent caterpillars in screened-in cages.
Stephen writes me letters, in pencil, on pages torn from lined workbooks, in which he ridicules everything he can get his hands on, including his fellow camp instructors and the girls they go drooling around after on their days off. He describes these instructors with pimples popping from their skins, fangs sprouting in their mouths, their tongues hanging out like those of dogs, their eyes crossed in permanent, girl-inspired imbecility. This makes me think I have power, of a sort. Or will have it: I too am a girl. I go fishing by myself, mostly so I’ll have something to put in my letters to him. Other than that I don’t have much to tell. Cordelia’s letters are in real ink, black in color. They are full of superlatives and exclamation marks. She dots her I’s with little round circles, like Orphan Annie eyes, or bubbles. She signs them with things like,
“Yours till Niagara Falls,” “Yours till the cookie crumbles,” or “Yours till the sea wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry.”
“I am
I feel as if I’m marking time. I swim in the lake provided, and eat raisins and crackers spread thickly with peanut butter and honey while reading detective stories, and sulk because there’s no one my age around. My parents’ relentless cheer is no comfort. It would almost be better if they could be as surly as I am, or surlier; this would make me feel more ordinary.
Nine - Leprosy
Chapter 41