Mirror in the Sky (11 page)

Sometimes I'm still able to remember bits and pieces of that night, like a hazy dream. At some point, Halle went to her room to fetch a turntable and set it up by the edge of the pool, playing records—the Pixies and Radiohead and Fool's Gold and Tame Impala. Jimmy Kaminsky wrapped his arm around my waist and tried to kiss my neck. I laughed and pushed him away.

“You look really pretty today, Tara.”

“Thanks,” I said, but I was too busy observing everyone to pay much attention to him. I watched Nick care for Alexa, stopping to talk to Veronica every few minutes with a look of concern in his eyes. They had an odd sort of sibling-type bond I had never noticed before. I noticed him jetting in and out of the house, making sure everyone had drinks in their hands, chatting up the girls and giving the boys high fives. I headed inside when I saw him and Halle kissing by the hot tub.

But there are two moments I remember best about that night, almost like those pivotal scenes you recall from a movie you watched some time back—those moments imprinted on your memory.

I stepped into a bathroom that was bigger than my parents' bedroom. There was a tiled fountain and tub that could fit at least six people, and two sinks and two gleaming white toilets, each in their own closets. An entire wall of the bathroom consisted of a bookshelf filled with books. Maybe it was that joint that I smoked, but just looking at that enormous bookshelf in the bathroom, I burst out laughing.

Veronica must have heard me, because she knocked on the door and joined me. We sat on the marble floor, perusing the selection of tomes. Among them, we found first editions of
Tom Sawyer
,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and
A Tale of Two Cities
.

“It's, like . . . first editions of our entire freshman-year English curriculum!” she said.

“And it's, like . . . two feet from the toilet.”

“I never even noticed these books. Come to think of it, I don't even know if I've ever used this bathroom. There are, like, sixteen in this house.”

“Sixteen bathrooms?” I shrieked. Veronica nodded, and we both started laughing again. And then we were both on the floor, cracking up so hard we couldn't stop. When we finally did, it was Veronica who spoke, weariness in her voice.

“I get so sick of her sometimes.”

“Who, Halle?”

“Who else?” Veronica rolled her eyes at me.

“I thought you guys were best friends.” My feelings about Halle had somehow shifted in one night. Her openness had disarmed me, but I still found myself resenting her, especially when I saw the way Nick was around her. The distribution of luck seemed entirely off in this world. Here was Halle—beautiful, smart, wealthy, charming,
and
she had a great boyfriend who adored her.

My father was always telling me that envy is a terrible thing, as though you could actually do something about it when you felt it. But you couldn't. It was like your DNA, so much a part of you that there was little you could do to alter it. And yet, I wondered if the other Tara on Terra Nova was jealous of Halle.
Probably not
, I decided.
She was probably gracious, above base feelings like envy and fear
.

“Best friends . . . I guess. Whatever that means,” Veronica said to me now. “It's a major pain when you've been friends with the same people your whole life. I've known Halle since we were in nursery school. She knows all my triggers, all my weaknesses, and she throws them out at me every chance she gets, just for the fun of it. All that stuff with Hunter . . .” Here she stopped and shook her head. “People become such . . . caricatures of themselves. Halle and her constant maneuvering. Alexa and her goddamned ‘food allergies.'” Veronica made air quotes, her hands in the air above our heads. “Hunter's a total moron with half a brain, in case you never noticed . . . And Nick . . . I guess he's not so bad. We used to swim together naked in the kiddie pool when we were in preschool.”

“I didn't realize you've known Nick for that long.”

“Oh, I have. He's such a . . . boy. I don't know what you see in him.”

“Me? I don't think you . . .”

“Oh, I think I do. I see the way you look at him with hearts in your eyes. You've been doing it for years. And the thing is, he likes you too, he'll just never realize it because he's so blinded by his stupid conception of Halle. And the thing is . . . she's already totally over him.”

My heart raced at the mention of Nick liking me too. I thought about how he had called me pretty in the car. “Does Halle . . .”

“Know that you're obsessed with her boyfriend? No. And besides, she doesn't care; she's way too self-involved to actually care about anyone.”

I was quiet for a long time before Veronica got up and looked back at me, pulling her hair into a high ponytail and fastening it with the tie she had around her wrist. “I won't tell anyone, Tara. I promise.”

It was like getting those e-mails; I felt again as though I was somehow now privy to things that I had never before seen or suspected. There were cracks in the veneer, fallouts and unspoken irritations. They were transitioning too, that entire group of friends, as friends sometimes are, like a mosaic being broken and remade. What I didn't know then was how much I would be a part of it or how much would break. I was still too caught up in the dizzying astonishment of the fact that I was becoming one of them.

My last memory of that night is the one I hope to hold on to always, especially since it's the kind of thing that happens only when you're at the right place at the right time, and you catch a glimpse of something that makes you believe in endless possibilities. Or maybe it's a moment that's precious to me because it's gone. We'll never come together like that ever again. Or maybe we were just really high, I don't know.

“Do you guys really think there are alternate versions of us up there?” Nick asked, looking up into that beautifully clear sky you can only see in places like backcountry Greenwich, the stars glittering like a fistful of diamonds flung into the air.

Everyone had left except for Nick, Veronica, Alexa, Halle, and me. We lay in the grass, surrounded by the detritus of the party, passing around yet another joint. Whiskey and wine warmed my stomach, and I was too inexperienced to know what happens the next morning when you mix that much whiskey with that much wine.

“Yeah, obviously. That's what that NASA bitmap thing was all about,” Veronica said.

“No. I mean, like, millions of versions. Not just on Terra Nova, but on other planets too,” Nick said.

“This is going to sound really weird, but sometimes I think
we're
not really
here
,” I said to him.

He laughed aloud. “What do you mean?”

“We're just . . . avatars of another mind that exists someplace out there. All of that”—I pointed to the sky—“what we call the cosmos, it's just circuitry—like we're looking at some
huge . . . motherboard lighting up and firing, and we call it stars and planets and sky.
We're
really up
there
. We just think we're here.” I didn't even know that I believed this till I said it.

“My mind is blown,” said Nick, laughing.

“What are you guys talking about?” Alexa asked, perplexed. She had finally woken up at the end of the party, only to join us in recline on the lawn.

“Tara thinks we're avatars,” Veronica told her.

“You know what I think?” Halle murmured. “I think there are, like, numerous versions of us, numerous avatars on countless planets, all controlled by a singular mind that wants to live out a multitude of experiences.”

“That's very Buddhist,” Alexa commented.

“Is it?” Halle said.

“No. I have no idea. I don't actually know anything about Buddhism,” Alexa said, and we all cracked up.

“I like that idea, though. That there are endless versions of us and none of us even knows about each other. That's sort of beautiful,” I said, lifting my head to look at her, and she nodded back at me, as though she was offering me a gift. I smiled in amazement. I was lying in the grass at Halle's house with Nick and Halle and Alexa and Veronica. For a moment, it felt like we were a family.

“It's . . .
cruel
—the idea that we're in the dark about ourselves, about our alternate selves,” Veronica said. “Why would the entire universe be constructed that way? Unless there is some sort of God and he just wants to fuck with us.”

“But what if that
is
the truth of it? Endless versions of us living endless versions of this life?” Nick asked.

“Maybe they're better versions of us,” Halle said.

“Better how?” I asked.

“Peaceful, compassionate, entirely void of feelings like rage, jealousy. Capable of appreciating what they have.”

I thought then about my own petty jealousies, my own resentments. Could Nick see them, the swell of those emotional cancers that had already begun to sprout within me? But when I looked at him, he was gazing upward at the sky, lost in another world, in that world.

“I wonder if there's a version of me out there who feels like she . . .” And I paused for a minute, because it didn't matter. I had found it, in that moment, without realizing it.

“Feels like she what?” Nick asked. His shoulder was pressed against mine.

“Nothing,” I told him. I reached for his hand and held it, without thought. But I still remember what I was going to say on that crisp and clear night, lying with Nick and Veronica on either side of me, a breeze rustling the leaves on trees, Nick's hoodie around my shoulders.

I wonder if there's a version of me out there who feels like she belongs.

THIRTEEN

M
Y
father often recounted a memory of growing up in India in the '80s. There were only two television stations back then—Doordarshan 1 and Doordarshan 2, and every family had just one TV. In the evenings, after dinner, everyone would gather around that one TV and watch the evening news.

“If you were out late and returning home during that hour, you could hear it coming from every living room, see the flicker of the TV screen in the window of every home. The same program, the same image, the same voices,” he told me.

I had never traveled to my father's ancestral home, and I knew that the Delhi of his childhood no longer existed. And yet, I found my father's nostalgia contagious. It was a strange feeling, that longing for an experience you never had, for
something that was never yours but might as well have been because it belonged to someone you love.

When Nick dropped me home in the wee hours of Sunday morning, I recognized that feeling again. At first, I thought it had to do with the beauty of that autumn morning, the dew on freshly cut grass, the slight crispness in the air, but then I looked carefully out the window of Nick's Jeep and saw it. Initially, it surprised me that every home on our block had a light on in the living room, at dawn, no less, but when I looked closer, I understood—in each living room, a TV, on each TV, the same program, the same image, the same voices. Different varietals of family, driven by the persistence of a story they couldn't escape.

“You should come in,” I told Nick. And by the time I realized what he might think of my tiny, shabby house, I couldn't take it back. Outside of the bubble of Halle's party, something had happened, and we were both curious to learn what it was.

Any apprehension I might have felt on the ride back—about returning to the emotional debris of my mother's decision still scattered across the floor, about my parents chastising me for staying out the entire night for the first time in my life—dissipated the moment I walked through that door. My parents turned briefly to acknowledge Nick and me, but they quickly turned back to the TV, the gravity of another planet too great to ignore.

We sat beside them, all of us watching in silence.

“Can you explain to us again what scientists discovered late last night in the US, morning in the UK?”

“Certainly,” said the British scientist, nodding, nervously running his fingers through his hair, “but I'd like to precede my explanation with a brief discussion of MERLIN, which stands for the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network, which is an array of radio telescopes spread out across England. It's about seven radio telescopes that have been monitoring radio signals from space for some time now.”

“Can you tell us a little about what MERLIN does?”

“MERLIN measures radio frequencies from radio-loud galaxies and quasars, and we also do something known as spectral line observations, which are essentially tools we use to identify the molecular construct of stars and planets.”

“Now, have we ever, in the past, discovered radio signals from other planets?”

“Well, till now, we've been looking at different parts of our galaxy, but, as you know, the galaxy is vast, and we haven't been confident if we're even looking for life in the right place.”

“But the discovery of Terra Nova changed that.”

“Yes, it did. Since we've been able to identify the location of B612, our radio telescopes have been detecting a handful of signals from the planet—first the message similar to the Arecibo signal, then the bitmap image that we decoded . . .”

“The image of the market.”

“Yes, that's right. And now we've received another signal . . . and we've been . . . hearing it continuously for the past eight hours. It not only confirms our belief that there is intelligent life on Terra Nova, but, like the bitmap image, also suggests
that Terra Nova is perhaps some sort of mirror Earth—or rather, an alternate Earth.”

“For our viewers tuning in now, let's replay some of the first sounds from Terra Nova.”

I looked at Nick, and he turned to look back at me. His mouth was slightly ajar, his eyes bloodshot. He looked adorable and disheveled and exhausted, like a child. I couldn't believe he was sitting in my living room. I wondered, for a moment, if my parents could tell that we had been drinking all night, but this thought lingered only for a second, an iridescent soap bubble, before it was dissipated by the sound from the television screen. There was static for some time, and then a voice, slightly high-pitched and eager. It was a young man . . . speaking English.

“The Columbian Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Wellington and the Mercurin Theater on the air in
The War between the Worlds
by H. M. Wells.”

A line of goose bumps trailed up my arm, and my mother reached for my hand. And then there was the sound of orchestral music. It was dramatic music, the kind from old movies. It sounded . . . like us, certainly not like something from an alien planet.

“It's Orson Welles's
War of the Worlds
. But it's their version, not ours,” my mother whispered. “They've been playing it all night, the entire broadcast and then snippets of it. It's exactly like ours.”

“Well, not exactly . . .” my father said, but I waved at him to
be silent so I could listen. The music stopped, and then there was that voice again, “Ladies and gentlemen: the director of the Mercurin Theater and star of these broadcasts, Orson Wellington.”

And then there was a different voice, a deep one, projecting gravity. “We know now that in the early years of the twentiest centuria, this world was being watched close by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns, they were studied and scrutinized, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a fractoscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

The static cut out, and the reporter, looking ashen, spoke again. “A remarkable moment in history. I've been listening to this recording . . . all night, and perhaps we've all sunk into a bit of a delirium, but . . .” He laughed for a moment, looking crazed as he rubbed his eyes. “What exactly are we supposed to make of this? How do we know it's not some . . . hoax?” An animated banner ran under his face.
AN
EDWARD
COPELAND
EXCLU
SIVE
, it said.

“It's an authentic signal, and it's coming from B612. NASA has confirmed it as well. It's most definitely not a hoax. You can clearly hear the distinctions between their broadcast and the one recorded by our very own Orson Welles in 1938. Their accents are different—linguists are currently studying their speech patterns. The music is slightly different; names of people and things are different—the Columbian Broadcasting Network instead of Columbia, the Mercurin Theater,
The
War
between
the Worlds
, H. M. Wells instead of H. G, Orson Wellington instead of Welles. These are small differences.”

“And the content . . .”

“. . . is slightly different. In their version of
War of the Worlds
, the aliens don't use heat rays to kill humans, they use psychic rays to influence their thought patterns. The aliens are eventually
defeated
by the natives rather than falling victim to pathogenic germs. These people—we're not quite certain what to call them as yet, but they seem to be . . . very much like us, so much so that they're capable of storytelling. They have their own theaters, their own broadcasting systems, their own fears of what's out there . . .”

“That is just . . .” The reporter shook his head, speechless.

“Inconceivable?”

“No . . . it's just . . . if they have their own versions of H. G. Wells and Orson Welles . . . does that mean that there are more coincidences beyond that?”

“The bitmap message we received was the first indication that their world is very similar to ours, but we're still investigating that, and it's too soon to know . . .”

“Yes, but . . . what are we supposed to . . . what do we make of this?” The reporter looked stricken, taking a moment to remove his glasses to wipe tears from his eyes. “We can't travel there . . . at least not for a long time. We won't meet them, at least not in my lifetime. What if it's true that there's another
me
up there? Another
you
? I'm sorry if I'm being emotional, but . . . what do we do with this information we're getting? How do we process it? What do we make of it?”

“Save the tears,” mumbled my father.

“Sudeep, he's . . . emotional.”

“He's a journalist. He can cry when he gets home.”

“Like all the rest of us . . .” My mother muttered, and my father flashed her a look. I avoided Nick's eyes. I didn't know what he thought of my family, bickering like this, or my home, for that matter—small and shabby and practically two feet from the train station. How did Nick see my life? An entire existence that was so different from his own.

“I should get going.” He looked at me. “I'm Nick, by the way.” He held his hand out to my father, and my father turned to look at him.

“You're the boy from outside the Starbucks.”

“Oh yeah, you remember. Nice to meet you, Mr. Krishnan.” He smiled.

“I would ask you why you're dropping my daughter off at dawn, but . . .”

“But Tara's a responsible girl and we're all exhausted and let's at least get a couple of hours of sleep before we talk about all this,” said my mother, getting up. “I'm glad you're home, honey.” She smiled at me, as though the earlier events of the day had been forgotten. I looked through her, but she continued to act as though everything was normal. “Drive safely on your way back, Nick,” she told him.

I walked Nick to the door. The sun was just beginning to rise over the horizon, painting everything around us a shade of amber. I noticed Nick's eyelashes for the first time, and a
cheesy thought struck me: They were the same color as the sunlight.

“I'll see you in school tomorrow,” he said, giving me a hug before I watched him get into his Jeep and drive off. All of a sudden, the insecurity I had felt just a moment before was replaced by amazement.

Nick Osterman was just in my living room
, I mused to myself.
I was in his car. We talked about what we wanted to do when we grow up. He made a pact with me that we'd meet up when we're twenty-five.

By the time I returned to the living room, my parents were gone. They must have decided to finally give in to sleep, exhausted from a day that seemingly had no end, a whorl of events that left us with little to hold on to.

I was spent too, and yet exhilarated, both from the party and from the latest discovery. I had often thought about people who lived through strange and compelling times—World War II, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement. These were periods that shaped people in some indelible way. I wondered how this moment would define us. I had never before believed that there was anything special about the era I was growing up in.

I arranged myself on the sofa, a cushion under my head, a throw over my legs, the remote in my hand. In that threshold between dream and wakefulness, I listened to the rebroadcast of another Orson Welles, on another planet, far away. I dreamt of another Tara, in the arms of another Nick.