The Well
“Baba,” I say in between sputtered breaths, “I—can’t—make—it.” I stop and plant my feet and pout up at her. But Baba is unstoppable.
“Baba,” I say in between sputtered breaths, “I—can’t—make—it.” I stop and plant my feet and pout up at her. But Baba is unstoppable.
“Come Na-na, just a bit further. Here, Baba can pick you up.” Baba pulls me forward by my arm and puts both hands under my armpits and lifts me up onto her shoulders. Tur stumbles on my shoulder as I am lifted, but he grabs onto my shirt and doesn’t fall off. I wrap my arms around Baba’s forehead and rest my cheek on her bun. She grabs onto my shins and continues up.
I am six years old, and I am on Baba’s shoulders because I am too tired after climbing half the way up the world. Today is the first time she takes me to her wishing well.
“There! Na-na look! That’s Lake Crane, and that—” she takes a hand off my shin and points down the mountain to a small wooden home with a sputtering chimney “—is Le Lounge Levitt.
“And there, dear, is our well.” She takes me from her shoulders and plants me to the ground and holds my hand. We walk to the well. It is gray cobblestone and rises almost to my shoulders. It is wide; the hole in the middle is maybe five feet in diameter. It is circled by a small ring of gravel and crowned with two metal forks that stick up from opposite sides and hold a wooden rod with a handle at one end that can be turned like a crank. In the middle of the rod hangs a large bucket attached by a thick coiling of rope. Baba rests one hand on the edge of the well and puts her other arm around my shoulder.
“Na-na. Have you decided yet what you want to wish for?”
I nod. “I want—”
“Wait! Let me guess! I know what it is!” She takes out a small square of paper and flattens it as much as you can flatten something against the cobblestone top of the well. She pulls a pen from the collection of pens that she always keeps in her pocket and writes something on the paper, folds it, and then passes it to Tur, though the paper is almost as big as he is. The little stone golem awkwardly clutches the folded paper to his chest. “What were you saying?”
“I want a bicycle!“
“Ah, but what color bicycle?”
“Red!” I shout.
She smiles. The way Baba always used to smile when I said just about anything at all. A smile like she knew what I was about to say but was excited to hear me say it anyway. “Tur, the paper? Can you read this, Na-na, like I’ve been showing you?” Tur offers me the paper and I take it in both hands and struggle to sound out the letters.
“Ruh, eh, duh… Red! Buh, ih, kuh… eh… Bik-eh? Bik-ee?”
“The E is silent,” she puts a finger to her lips.
“Bik… Bik… Red bik. Red bike!” My mouth opens wide. “A red bike! How did you know, Baba?”
She wiggles her finger on her lips. “That’s not even the magic part. Here, hand me the paper. And, do you have that quarter I gave you back at the house? Good.” She wraps the quarter in the paper and then hands it back to me. “Drop it in the well. Think about your bike when you do.”
I lean over the side. The well is deep. I can’t see the bottom. It is dark and black and nothing, not even light, can escape. I hold the quarter and the note over the well in a clenched fist and then release. It falls and falls and then disappears suddenly maybe thirty feet down. I do not hear a splash. Baba unhooks a clasp on the rod that holds the bucket and it, too, falls and then disappears into blackness without a splash, caught by a taut rope.
“Perfect. Let’s go back down. It’s almost time for lunch.”
“What about my bike?”
“Come, now, Na-na. Always wait for things worth waiting for.”
The walk down Baba’s mountain is faster than the way up. I do not need her to carry me.
Then it is the next morning, and we are back at the well.
“Go on, try to pull up the bucket,” she says. I grab the handle and try to turn it but it doesn’t turn. It is the heaviest thing. Baba puts her hand next to mine on the crank and it turns. Baba is so strong. I let go and put both hands on the edge of the well and peer over. I see the bucket. And I see, laid across the top, a red bicycle.
“Baba! My bike!” She pulls it level with the edge of the well and latches the crank in place. Then she leans over and takes the bike and puts it down in front of me.
“Happy birthday, Anna. You’ve gotten so big this year—” her smile, again “—I can’t even believe it! Na-na is so big! This bike is just half of your gift. The other half—” she pats the well “—this is my wishing well. Your Baba wants to give you the world, while she still can, and this is how I will do it. One wish, every time you come visit, got it?”
I nod. I wish that I run over and hug her and say thank you for giving me a magic well that contained the whole world and almost everything I could ever want but I don’t and instead she hugs me first and I hug her back and bury my face in her dress and it smells like Baba and I say nothing. I look up and she smiles.
“Happy birthday, dear.” The cake is made of ice cream and has eight blue and white spiraled candles. I am at the head of the table and Baba places the cake right in front of me. Dad sits to the left, one arm on my shoulder. Tur and Erwin play by the fireplace. The little golem circles around Baba’s gray tabby, dodging pounces and teasing her with surprising nimbleness.
“Ben, can you grab a picture?”
“Oh, right, of course.” Dad stands up and takes out his phone. Baba bends down and wraps an arm around my shoulder. “Anna, smile!” I give a big smile that’s missing a couple teeth and they sing happy birthday and I blow out the candles and we all eat cake.
“Mom, like I was saying before, the folks down at the garage want you there desperately. Admin, too. Director Stone’s willing to send a plane first thing tomorrow and if you get on it you’ll just make the jump. It would make everyone’s day.”
“Nonsense! Na-na still needs to make her birthday wish, and then we need to collect it. Ben, tell Ed I’ll come tomorrow night.”
“You’ll miss the jump! Mom, you know how much this means to all of them.”
“I said: nonsense.” She gives me a little squeeze on my arm. “I’ve got other plans that take priority. Ed and his team will have plenty to focus on tomorrow without me there, and I’ll stop by after.”
Dad closes his eyes and shakes his head and smiles. “Right. Of course. I’ll let them know. They’ll understand.” He laughs and stares at Baba for a quiet moment. “Only you, Mom.”
After cake we hike up to the well. The sun is low and it is cool, and the sky is spilled orange juice bleeding into paper towel clouds. I am older now, and the mountain is quickly shrinking to the size of a hill, but Baba still insists on taking me the last bit of the way up on her shoulders. She is in her sixties, but she is still an unstoppable and wild force.
It helps that Baba lives in a low-gravity part of Oregon. Her joints age more slowly, and I weigh half my age.
Most of you know Barbara Levitt, of course, for the Levitt-Winger Jump Drive. As if that were her only, or even her greatest, trick.
I know her for the lifetime she spent creating magic for her granddaughter.
That year I get a chocolate bar that never runs out of squares.
Erwin is dead when I next visit. I do not know until I arrive. Tur notices first. He jumps out of my pocket as soon as we walk inside and runs to her perch by the kitchen window. His face is a single smooth pebble, but he still looks downcast. Maybe it’s the way he slouches on the brick in front of the fireplace that night when we take our tea. Baba is too happy to see me to be sad about Erwin, but something is missing all the same.
“It’s been so long Na-na! Almost a year, no?”
“It’s been two years, Baba! And can you please call me Anna? Na-na was my baby name.” I am ten and this is my first time visiting Baba on my own. Dad is overseas, at a conference, and I am too grown up for baby names.
“Ah, right, that long? And, hey! You are still my little baby,” she reaches over and bops my nose and I let her. “Oh look at that—” she glances over to the coffee table “—one cookie left. How about we settle it with a game of sticks?”
I smile and nod. Baba wins, though, and she eats the cookie. “You know, I would probably have let Na-na have the last one anyway, but Anna is too grown up to be allowed to win every game.”
“Maybe I can be Na-na when I’m visiting,” I say, thinking about cookies and row boat rides on the lake and bedtime stories.
“Ah! I knew it! I guess that means I need to go get some more cookies. One second, dear.” She stands up. “But we should pack these to go. You are getting bigger. I think you are old enough to head up to the well at night. Did you decide what you wanted to wish for?”
“I think so.”
It is dark outside and a little scary, and I hold Baba’s hand as we climb up the trail. Tur patrols around us as we walk. The little golem is holding a toothpick like a spear, and it is enough to keep us safe. Most forest creatures are scared away by the gravitational anomalies here, anyway. Except for squirrels and hummingbirds and bluejays and a couple kinds of spiders. I think I see Tur scare off one of those.
When we get to the top, the trees clear suddenly and the sky opens up. I feel dizzy. I remember one time, a year before, I was at a wedding in New York City and I had been allowed to drink so much soda that my stomach hurt, and from the rooftop I could see, across the river, a million lights, drowning out the night sky. This is like that, but upside down. The forest rolls out darkness for miles around us and above there are so many stars. The moon is one quarter full and very low, and on the other side of the sky I can see the broad stroke of the Milky Way. Every so often bright lights zip across the stars. I have never seen the sky so alive, and I feel something in my head not unlike the fizz of Coca-Cola.
“I need to teach you the constellations, next, Na-na… Ah but not tonight. Oh, but look! You see that?” Baba points due south, a little above the horizon. “It’s Scorpio, jutting out from the main belt of the galaxy. Oh oh!—” she keeps pointing. She swears it looks like a scorpion, but I am lost in the stars and can’t tell what she is pointing at. I nod and pretend I see it, of course, because Baba is brilliant and I want to be brilliant, too. “And you can’t see it from here but in his tail, right at the tip of his pincer, is Gliese 667! And that’s where 667Cc is. It’s a small rocky planet only a little bigger than Earth, but it’s almost four times heavier! Baba wouldn’t be able to pick you up, there—” she laughs from deep in her stomach “—it’s a warm eighty-four degrees, and there are three suns in the sky! Can you imagine that, Na-na? Three suns!
“It’s twenty-three lightyears away. And there are people there! They live in caves underground, right now, but there are robots hard at work building cities beneath big glass domes in giant canyons. And they left our solar system just a year ago, the day after your eighth birthday…”
“I’m ten, Baba! That was two years ago.”
“Right! Two years ago! Can you imagine visiting? Needing to wear the special suspensors that help you stand up in four-times gravity and getting to watch three separate sunrises every morning?” I imagine stepping out onto the balcony of a canyon city and looking up into the sky and seeing the walls of the canyon climbing up and above it a bright clear day and three suns, and I imagine one of them is yellow and like Earth’s and another is red and the third is bright purple.
We make the wish. This time I ask to write it down and I do. Baba shines the flashlight from her phone down at the paper so I can see it in the dark, but I tell her to look away so she can’t see what I’m wishing for.
Before we leave, she takes some time to show me the constellations. This time I pay more close attention. I learn what Virgo looks like, partly covered by the moon, and we make up a story about Ursa Minor, floating playfully on his back to the north above his mother Major.
The next day we return. There is only one sun in the sky and no scorpions or bears, and Baba is very happy. “Tur,” she says, turning back as we enter the clearing with the well, “You are going to love this one.” She is right, but I am not sure how she knows, since I never showed her what I wished for. We pull up the bucket (I am helpful this time) and a gray tabby cat jumps out. Tur jumps off my shoulder and onto the edge of the well. The cat pounces and Tur dodges and they spar and within a few minutes she stops and bends down and nuzzles Tur, and the golem puts his arms wide and hugs her face.
“Woah!” I say, “She looks just like Erwin, doesn’t she!”
Baba smiles and picks up the kitten. “What do you want to call her, dear?”
“Erwin the second!” I say. Baba smiles and says it is a wonderful name. When Dad comes to pick me up we decide it’s best if Erwin II stays at Baba’s to keep her company, and that I’ll come back to visit soon.
When I visit again, Erwin II is fully grown. She is just as sweet a cat as Erwin was, and is fast friends with Tur. Dad comes this time, and we bring Baba’s favorite chocolate danishes from a small bakery in Pasadena. She makes ricotta stuffed shells for dinner and they’re not as good as I remember, but the danishes are even better. We wash down dessert with tall glasses of milk, and I ask if we can go up to the well so I can show her all the constellations I learned from my space book and make my wish.
“Ah, Na-na,” Baba looks pale and more wrinkled than usual, “I am so sorry to break a promise, but we cannot make a wish tonight. Tomorrow morning, I promise, and then I can go up on Tuesday and get your telescope and send it right along priority mail for you!”
I am not surprised she knew what I was wishing for, but I am visibly disappointed.
“I’m sorry, dear, Baba just isn’t up for the hike right now. Ah… Let me go upstairs and get something. Ben can you go get the picnic blanket from the pantry and go set it up outside, Anna go help.”
She comes back with a heavy box which she places on the blanket out in the front yard. She opens it and takes out a large cylinder—a telescope tube—and its tripod, which she sets up on the dirt. She fiddles with the direction of the tube and then puts her eye to the telescope and adjusts it further. “Anna, come look!” She is beaming as she guides me to the eyepiece of the telescope.
I look through and see a bright quarter moon, the surface is marked with craters I never noticed before.
“Na-na, tell me, is that moon one quarter full or one quarter empty?”
“What do you mean, Baba?”
“Is that the first quarter or that last quarter? Is the moon growing or shrinking?”
“I don’t know?”
“It’s growing! We call it the waxing quarter. There was a new moon last week, on Friday, I think, or maybe Tuesday. I remember because Erwin and I were watching… Oh… Mm… That’s not the point, Na-na can I tell you a story about how we know the difference between waning—that’s when the moon is shrinking—and waxing? Keep watching the moon.
“The Hebrew calendar is based on the cycles of the moon. So in ancient times they needed to know when the new moon was so they knew when to start the new month. The ancient Israelites had a rule for this, to make sure they never messed it up. They asked the people to come to the temple once they had seen the waxing crescent moon—the first night after the new moon—so they could signal the start of the new month. But they needed to make sure what these people saw was actually a waxing moon, and not a waning moon. The rabbis didn’t want to accidentally start a new month too early! So what could they do?”
I thought for a moment, as a bright flash of some satellite crosses in front of the moon. “They could take a picture of the both the waxing and waning moon and show it to the people so they knew which one they saw.”
“Ah hah! Brilliant, as usual, my little starling! This is the same solution Rabbi Gamliel thought of, back in ancient times. Of course they didn’t have cameras, so he commissioned an artist to draw the phases of the moon as accurately as possible, in order that when witnesses came to the temple to testify about the new moon he could point at the diagram and ask ‘Did you see a form like this or like this?’ But that created another problem.
“You see, as the other rabbis pointed out, it is written in the Torah that ‘You shall not make with Me gods of silver, or gods of gold’ which was originally about the making of idols, and the rabbis argued that there was no more a ‘god of silver’ than the Moon itself, and so Rabbi Gamliel should be forbidden from having the diagrams. Rabbi Abaye responded to this by arguing that the Torah only prohibited exact copies. He quoted a passage that said people could own candelabras with five or six or eight candles, but not seven since that was the number of candles held by the candelabrum in the holy temple. Since one could not copy the form of the moon exactly, it was okay to make diagrams of it!”
I had expected a story about princesses slaying space dragons and not rabbis discussing candelabras—but Baba is so excited that the story takes on the excitement in her voice, and I imagine, looking through the eyepiece of the telescope, several old rabbis standing on the edge of a lunar crater, candlelit and arguing about drawings of the moon.
“The other rabbis, though, were still not satisfied. They pointed out that the Oral Laws forbid the fashioning of likenesses of human faces, as people were made in the image of God. That is, although you could not reproduce a person’s face exactly, the person’s face was made in the image of God, and so images of images of holy objects were forbidden, and so were Rabbi Gamliel’s drawings.
“At this point another rabbi steps in and accepts that fashioning images of the Moon is prohibited, but says Gamliel’s diagrams are allowed because he had a non-Jewish artist fashion them for him, and so no law was broken. To this, the rabbis respond that even possessing a forbidden image arouses suspicion of idol worship and is forbidden! Finally, Rabbi Gamliel, who has been quiet this whole time, speaks. He says that the Torah commands us to learn to understand it. Images are forbidden for the purpose of decoration, but these diagrams exist for the purpose of more fully understanding God. The law prohibits images of images of holy objects, but makes exception for the purpose of study and learning. The other rabbis are silenced by this argument. After a short while they agree. Study is the most holy thing, and insofar as Rabbi Gamliel’s diagrams are used to help them better understand creation, they are, themselves, holy.
“If you remember only one thing I say, Na-na, let it be that learning is holy.”
After the story Dad sends me to go brush my teeth and after I do I come back downstairs and notice him and Baba are still outside. Dad has his feet turned away from her and the house and is looking up at the stars. Baba seems hunched over and has one hand in a fist by her side. Her voice is thunderous when she speaks. “I will not leave this house. You know exactly why.” She seems angry, which she never was, and, confused, I go back inside and up to bed.
The next morning Baba wakes me up early and we watch the sun rise from the clearing by the well and I make my wish. Later that week the package comes and that summer right before school starts back up Dad takes me camping and we bring the telescope and point it up at space and he shows me where Neptune is. He says we have to come back early next year and he can show me Saturn which is Baba’s second favorite planet in our solar system. I ask what her favorite is and he says Earth and I ask why and he says it’s because I am on Earth. Then we pack up the telescope and put it back in the car and get into the tent and our sleeping bags and go to sleep.
I knock on the door, but Baba doesn’t answer.
It’s open. I enter. “Baba,” I take on a voice Dad reserves for chastising me, “you really ought to lock that door.” I furrow my brows and wag my finger, turning to find her.
She’s sitting in her chair, by the fireplace, which is unlit. The telescope is still half-assembled in the corner of the room, and Erwin sits in her lap. She stares at the fireplace, and if her eyes weren’t open and she weren’t petting Erwin, I would think she were asleep.
Tur hops off my shoulder and lands on the ground with a soft thud. Erwin notices and jumps to meet him. Baba turns and notices.
“Anna!” She brightens immediately, “You’re here! Erwin and I were just waiting for you.” She stands and has her normal energy and starts over to the kitchen, and I see foil wrapping next to the stove. Cookies, likely.
“Anna!” I smile, “Baba! When did you start calling me Anna?”
Baba pauses mid-cookie-fetching and strides over to meet me by the door. She wraps her arms around me in a tight bear-hug and lifts me a few inches off the ground. “You’re not a little girl anymore. My little Na-na has grown up into a beautiful woman, and… It seems even Baba, strong as an ox (or at least as strong as an old lady on the moon) won’t be able to lift her up much longer. Na-na,” she says, releasing me and looking into my eyes, “was a little girl I could carry. Anna, who I see now, can plenty-well carry herself.” She gets the cookies, checking the kettle on the stove. “It looks like I let this one boil off, the tea might be a few minutes late.”
I smile and take a seat on the couch. Erwin jumps up into my lap and I scratch under her chin and release a satisfied purr. “Can we go up to the well tonight? I’m super excited to get my wish.”
“Oh, what a great idea,” Baba says, bringing cookies over to the coffee table, “we can set it up tomorrow to watch Saturn!”
I look at her, frowning.
“This,” she pauses, “time is the telescope, right, dear?”
“Baba, I got a telescope last year, this year I want to wish for—”
“A phone!” She cuts me off, loudly.
“Right!” I smile. “The new Voxel. It, uh, comes out tomorrow… So I’ll be the first one to have it. Is that alright?”
“Anna,” Baba shakes her head and picks up Tur from his perch on the edge of the coffee table, holding him out to me, “I could’ve gotten you this new phone years ago.”
I grin, set Tur down on Erwin’s head—the two take off immediately around the room—and move to take a couple cookies.
I’m back a few months later. The door’s unlocked again—the start of a pattern—and I let myself in. Baba’s not there, and I call out to her while I make my way over to the kitchen to grab a Hershey Kiss from the bowl she keeps on the countertop. There’s a piece of letter paper next to a pen and a couple unwrapped Kisses. On it there are words.
A letter with the contents:
Dear Barb,
Strange how I can still find myself surprised sometimes. I guess not so strange, all things considered. I suppose I always knew when this would happen, but never quite how it’d feel. Blah, enough of that. There’s plenty more I need to tell you, and I don’t mean to cramp your hand too badly writing down our ramblings—
“Anna! Oh when did you get here? I hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long…” Baba walks in and I glance up from the letter. She looks at me and then at the table and a bit of heat rises to my ears and I quickly take a Kiss and walk over to give her a hug. If she notices I was reading her mail, she doesn’t act like it. She walks over to the table—had she always walked so slowly?—and folds the letter to take it away. I notice there’s a back-side to it, and though I can’t make out any words, I can see parts of large sprawling equations containing symbols I don’t recognize. Baba drops a quarter she’s been holding into the paper and continues folding it up small and then pockets it.
“Making a wish, Baba?”
She smiles, “You can’t be keeping all the magic to yourself, my little star.”
I lift the edges of my lips but don’t quite smile. That night we have stuffed shells and we go up the hill to the well to stargaze and Baba makes her wish and tells stories about when I was a toddler and she still worked at NASA. “The engineers originally called that part the LOL, for Life/Organic signature Listener, but then admin made them change it. They didn’t want the public thinking we were just fooling around on taxpayer money.” She’s talking about the Saturn mission. Some people get lost in their own stories, but not Baba. She seems the least lost when telling them.
I’ve heard this one before, multiple times, but I understand she is telling it more for herself than for me.
I ask her to tell me again about the Gliese colony and close my eyes imagining life in giant canyons underneath thick radiation proof glass and the heat of three suns, and I listen for that same heat in Baba’s voice.
The next day I go back up to the well to make my wish. Baba is too tired and stays back with Erwin. She doesn’t try to guess what I’m wishing for.
I ask for a piece of the sky, and it is wonderful.
Dad is not surprised that Baba has a golem, too. Rut is larger than Tur, who also doesn’t seem that surprised when the bigger golem takes my backpack from the trunk and carries it overhead inside and up to the guest bedroom.
Inside Baba has left cookies out, but I know they will be a little stale. I take out a gift we’d found in a gift shop at a museum in San Francisco a few months before. It’s covered in wrapping paper that was left over from Hanukkah.
“Baba. I found this and thought of you!”
She tears into the gift and takes it out. It’s a small replica of a space probe—a grey matte metal cube with four large antennae sticking out one side—suspended in a black donut shape with harsh geometric edges. She looks confused for a moment and then finds herself.
“Na-na, this is brilliant!” She takes the edge of the donut between two fingers and spins it on its primary axis—the whole thing is suspended by some magnet array above a glass rectangle base—and it lights up as it spins. “Do you know why they call this ring the LW drive?”
“It’s short for Levitt-Winger.” I smile, letting her talk.
“And do you know who Levitt is?”
“That’s you, Baba.”
“Right! But, do you know who Winger is?”
“That’s your mysterious collaborator, Baba. The one you worked with to figure out the HBST equations, who no one else has ever met.” Most people don’t think Winger ever existed. They think Baba made up the collaborator to seem more mysterious or maybe as some kind of joke. Regardless, the name stuck. When you invent light speed travel, you’re able to get away with a lot.
“People think I made her up”—the lights from the model LW drive reflect off her eyes—“but those people just don’t understand our math. I went to her wedding, you know… Beautiful thing.” She stares into the model.
“Mom.” Dad is by the kitchen counter, one hand on an old paper calendar. One of the thick ones that cover multiple years. “You have today circled as my birthday… That’s not for another few months.”
The model stops spinning and the lights die down.
“Ah, right. Dear.” She gives a weak smile and Erwin jumps up onto her lap. “Maybe you just don’t understand the math, either.”
Dad frowns. He’d made a hotel reservation for himself, but stays on the pull-out couch the next couple days instead. I wish for a silver chain—I don’t ask Baba to guess—and hang my piece of the sky on it. I think of silver linings.
I do not call as much as I should and when I do there is not much to talk about.
Instead I wait until I have a project for history class. I need to interview someone who lived through some important moment of history, so I call Baba.
She is still brilliant, then, talking about history. Telling stories about breaking physics and confounding Einstein and spaceships shooting across the stars. Usually, though…
Sometimes it seemed she was drifting into the past even faster than I was headed into the future. Alice would notice this later, too. At one point she said it was cruel that the universe could take a woman who understood time better than anyone else and rip away her sense of it so entirely.
Baba calls to wish me luck at school, and I’m surprised she remembers.
I study English in college. I think part of me couldn’t bear to be the same kind of mediocre as Dad, another generation of Levitt again eclipsed against Baba’s brilliance, and so I turn as far away from science as I can. That’s not totally true. I don’t turn away from Alice, who is studying aerospace engineering.
It’s summer break and Alice and I are spending a weekend at Baba’s cottage. At this point we’re still convinced we’re just friends which is, of course, absurd. We swim in the lake and hike in the mountains and one night we bring Baba’s old telescope up the hill to the well and see Saturn and stay up well past midnight until we can see Jupiter, too. I don’t tell her the well is magic, yet, but I do wish for a fancy new sketch pad and pack of colored pencils and give them to her as a gift.
Alice is a bit of an artist and more than a bit of a Baba fan (again: studying aerospace) and brings a drawing of hers as a thank you gift for letting us stay the weekend. It’s a wonderful sealed charcoal thing based off the story of the rabbis arguing about the moon. Three old bearded men are set, two against one, at the edge of a crater offset slightly to the side of a vast lunar landscape. Above them are stars and a large detailed earthrise poking out from the void. Two of the men are standing with furrowed brows and pointed gestures. One of them is shouting. They’re both hunched over a lone man, supposed to be Gamliel, with big round glasses and a kippah that seems to reflect the stars above. He’s sitting, legs hanging over the edge of the crater and arms out to his side. His head is turned up slightly and he has this light smile and pensive look in his eyes as he looks across the moon and into the universe beyond, and every time I see the picture I wonder what he’s thinking.
I’d already explained that Baba might not understand the gift, but Alice still insisted.
“I’ve been inspired by your work since I was 10,” she says, giving Baba the drawing.
Baba takes it and flattens it against the counter with her hands and scans it thoroughly, but there’s no real trace of recognition behind those thick grandma glasses.
“Ha ha. That’s so nice, dear.” She understands what she’s supposed to say, at least.
“How’ve you been, Baba?” I ask.
“Oh, you know. Same old, same old…” I smile with pursed lips, and Alice does a wonderful job of not seeming dejected. I’m almost convinced she’s not.
Rut brings out sandwiches. He’s grown quick and is almost my size. He swaps the drawing for lunch and brings it and a frame over to Tur who’s sitting on the coffee table and who soon sets out to carefully mount the picture into the frame. It’s hung up on the wall by the time Alice and I come back from a hike that night, though we’re not sure how the golems managed that without thumbs.
We make stuffed shells for dinner, using Baba’s old recipe. She is quiet while we eat.
I try again to start conversation but it dies in the air between us. I look at Baba. I know so much about her. Some I’d learned from her. Some from history class. But in that moment she seems so small. There is an emptiness I just want to fill with my presence but do not know how to. In that moment, she clearly does not know me, and I, I think, do not know her.
I am not sure I ever did.
I turn and talk to Alice as Baba eats in silence.
The next morning we pack and prepare to head out. I give Baba a hug goodbye, and she notices the drawing on the wall, as if for the first time.
“Is that new, starlight?”
“Yeah, Baba. Alice made it for you.”
She walks up close to the frame. “What a beautiful drawing! It’s like that story I used to tell you, Na-na. Ha! Oh I love the craters and the earth hung in the darkness…” She brushes her thumb against the figure sitting on the edge of the crater. “Na-na, did you see Saturn? I think you can see Saturn tonight if you take the telescope.”
“Yeah, Baba, we did. A couple nights ago, and again last night. Thanks for the recommendation.” We hug again and then head out.
I can feel Alice glowing the whole way back to the airport.
I don’t think my behavior is uncommon.
I am afraid and uncomfortable and so I hide from her. I don’t know what else to do. I call every now and then, when Dad reminds me that I should, but the calls are brief and we don’t say much and I don’t think they do much for her, either.
That’s not true.
I know the calls could be important to her even if it doesn’t seem that way. Even if it seems like she might not recognize who I am. Even if she doesn’t remember our conversation after I hang up.
Golden is any mass, no matter how light, that pulls her towards this side of oblivion.
When I forget to call I realize that I was never as special as she thought I was. Certainly, I wasn’t worth all the doting. All the magic. For how highly she thought of me, I was certainly never as one of a kind as Barbara Levitt.
Still, I’m thankful to have been Baba’s singular mistake.
Dad visits a lot more than me in the years that follow. I am too swept up in the second half of college and a few extra years of grad school and then hustling around trying to find a foothold in the world of political data journalism. At one point I visit shortly after Erwin II dies, and the house feels so empty that I leave Tur—who I’ve outgrown—to stay with Rut and keep Baba company. Otherwise, Dad says she doesn’t ask after me too much. Alice doesn’t visit with me again until 6 years later.
That time it’s early June and the air is a particular kind of crisp warmth known only to the Pacific Northwest. We wake up early for a long hike and return exhausted. I’d forgotten how strangely the animals behave around this place’s gravity. We clean ourselves up and spend a long time making a big mess of Baba’s kitchen, all in the name of a homemade deep dish pizza dinner. Baba enjoys it, too, but she is clearly a bigger fan of the box brownie and gas station ice cream sundaes we have afterward which took a sixth of the time to make.
I help Baba to bed, and then Alice and I savor the strange gravity of this place that allows us to ignore our newly added pounds of carbs as we walk up to the well. We talk about time and make plans to move to the black hole at the center of the galaxy so that it won’t pass so fast. We wish for two perfect dresses and a stack of wedding invitations for Anna and Alice Levitt-Winger. We sit on the edge of the well for a long time making brunch plans for the day after the heat death of the universe.
I am certain now that Alice Winger is the collaborator Baba named in her early papers. In this way, she hid, in her greatest scientific accomplishment, yet another gift for me.
Baba was wrong, though. She does not come to the wedding. She remains remarkably sturdy, but we decide maneuvering her through airports and hotel stays would be too confusing. Afterwards whenever we visit and she is lucid we show her photos and she is ecstatic. And each time she tells me to take Alice up to the well for a wedding gift. We visit more than usual in that last year. I think we can all feel her slipping quickly. There are fewer and fewer moments where she really seems present in more than the most mechanical sense.
I guess I’d expected her mind would just fade linearly until she forgot how to breathe, or something like that. I didn’t expect to see her soul go first. At some point her mind was still there, and she could operate (golem-assisted) day-to-day and moment-to-moment, but the gray matter that acted was like an impression around a core that had already faded. She would smile and laugh and make the same jokes she’d always made. But this layer was paper-thin, and you’d know from the way her eyes stayed dull and her speech faltered into confusion if you tried to dig any deeper than surface level that Baba, the unstoppable force, was gone.
Alice compared it to falling into a black hole.
When something falls past the event horizon, outside observers see it stop moving. You can’t see something fall further than that because the event horizon is, by definition, the point past which light cannot escape. Instead the object just freezes on that precipice to infinity and slowly fades to black.
She dies in July.
There is a small funeral and then a large public memorial service where Alice recognizes more people than I do. It’s strange how isolated Baba kept me from her science stardom, and that gap between her two lives is more apparent than ever in the days following her death.
I give a short eulogy at the funeral. It focuses on how I always pretended Baba’s cookies were better than they actually tasted and how she’d lift me up onto her shoulders when I got tired during hikes until we were both well past the age where she ought to be doing that and how she taught me to look up at the sky and wonder. Her New York Times obituary, of course, includes none of that, focusing instead on how “she was the paragon of her field, a woman of unbridled talent and brilliance whose contribution to science has enabled Man to reach into the deepest depths of the heavens themselves.” Amidst the lingering memories of the last few years, this view of her life feels so sterile. As if everything that actually mattered about Baba was shoved into the final sentence: “Dr. Levitt is survived by her son, Ben of Los Angeles, and grandchild, Anna.”
I can’t imagine a model of the universe in which Baba does not revolve around me.
We bury her by the house in a plot next to where Dad and Baba had buried her husband Abraham before I was born. Baba had planted an oak tree in place of a headstone for grandpa and so Dad and I wish for an acorn and plant it above her grave, too. At Dad’s insistence, we still leave a modest plaque with her name and years, and at my insistence we leave a simple engraving of Saturn in place of an epitaph, which Baba would’ve had no patience for. She always preferred to take whatever spotlight shined on her and point it towards illuminating the universe, instead.
That night Dad and I dust off the telescope and watch the sky from Baba’s yard. The moon is in waxing gibbous and Saturn is visible inside Capricorn.
Baba leaves me the house, and Alice and I get away to it often. I feel bad that sometimes, in the late summer months when the weather is perfect, we visit more frequently than we did when she was alive. We hike and kayak and find some mountain biking trails where the gravity is especially light and I’m not so afraid of falling face first over my front wheel. We makes wishes, often, and sometimes frivolously. I wish for diamond earrings that contain galaxies as a gift for Alice one night, and then the next night I wish for proofed pizza dough because we forgot to make some early enough to give it time to rise. Sometimes we drive up and immediately drop our grocery list in the well in order to avoid a shopping trip the following morning.
I open my eyes and am immediately startled. Rut is standing over the bed, quiet as clay, waiting.
“What the fuck, Rut?”
The golem straightens up and taps me on the forehead and then motions with the same hand out towards the door.
“Can’t this wait?”
He taps me on the forehead again and motions towards the door with more urgency.
I roll out of bed, Alice is starting to wake but is still groggy. Rut leads me towards the kitchen where there’s a large cardboard storage box on the counter. I lift the lid and find… Stacks and stacks of paper calendars? Some are the thick multi-year kind, and others are just normal ones you could get at any stationary store. Some are themed; as I skim through I notice a Disney one and another with a bunch of rockets. They’re all old. The paper is starting to turn brittle. Each has two years on the front, but the numbers don’t make sense. One is labeled 2028 (~2020), another 2041 (~2006). I pick up 2037 (~2011)—it’s National Geographic themed, with pictures of snow leopards and other animals atop each month—and skim through. May 20 — A brand new Voxel 10 phone. I look through the earlier calendars and find similar notes.
July 20, 2034 — Gray tabby kitten.
May 17, 2030 — Red bike.
May 18, 2024 — A living golem to protect her.
May 17, 2024 is my birthday and is starred numerous times in red ink.
July 29, 2036 just has a single word ABE written on it.
I skim ahead to later dates and my knees buckle.
June 10, 2050 — 2 wedding dresses, 1 stack wedding invitations for “Anna, Alice Levitt-Winger”
Baba was barely lucid that time, and she’d never seen us collect the dresses.
April 18, 2054 — Proofed pizza dough.
Baba was dead then.
April 28, 2056 — 1 Pint Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked Ice Cream.
That was yesterday.
April 29, 2056 — The letter.
And then nothing else. The rest of 2056 is empty—I check once I see today’s date filled in—and there are no calendars for any year after.
“What the heck is this, Rut? Have you been writing down all my wishes? What is the letter?”
Rut puts another piece of paper on the counter. I flatten it out and start to read.
A letter with the contents:
Dear Barb,
You were right to be drawn back here. That tugging at your mind, that gravity you feel, is real and you will spend years in the orbit of this place. To be young and so full of potential… I wish I could go on that journey again, but it suffices for me to know what’s ahead for you.
The well is, like you suspect, a well-contained infinite energy potential singularity. The implication, to borrow the pun from your mind, is massive. Yes, dear: If you study it further you will find achievable negative mass solutions to the field equations. Obviously we need a certain amount of discretion here—you’re already realizing what a cluster-fuck this could turn into if Ed finds out what’s here and the government gets involved. This can get us to the stars! We need to make sure it isn’t used to just blow us all up instead. You won’t be totally alone. I’ll send back a couple more letters with some useful math at the appropriate times, and Abe will have fantastic insights, as usual. You’ll crack this.
There’s one other thing.
The well punches a twisted hole through spacetime. Time is reversed on either side, as if the timeline is a piece of string flowing forward until it loops around some date in your future/my past and then flows back into our future. The well acts as a tunnel between adjacent sections of the string. Right now it’s 1992 for you, but for me, on the far side of the string, it’s 2056. Your tomorrow is my yesterday when viewed from the perspective of the singularity. That’s going to be incredibly important for mathematic reasons you’ll realize soon, but the immediate implication is this: In order to maintain a consistent timeline and a connection through the well, we need to establish a protocol. It works like this.
Every day, you’ll check the well. If you find something in the bucket, you will describe what you find on a piece of paper and then the following day you will fold the paper around a quarter and drop it into the well. From your perspective, you’re cataloguing the well’s past gifts, but from my perspective I’m wishing for future ones. Time is reversed on either side of the singularity. The gifts we take out of the well are the same, and the notes we drop in are also the same. The difference is the direction they’re traveling through time.
That includes this letter. Get a piece of paper and write “A letter with the contents: Dear Barb, …” and so on and drop it in the well tomorrow. That’ll have been my yesterday and the paper you drop will be the same one I dropped then.
As long as you only drop notes into the well describing what you take out of it and as long as you never miss a day, then we’ll maintain entangled causality. Because you take gifts from the well and write them down the day after, we guarantee that every time I send a note into the well, the following day I will get out what I wrote down.
You’re wondering why you need a coin. It’s because I include coins with all my notes, so yours must have them too.
I don’t want to spoil too much, dear, but there’s one thing I’ll tell you now. You’re a grandmother. Her name is Anna and she is the most wonderful light in the entire universe.
That’s the other reason you need to check the well every day. You remember the story Mom would tell us about the boy and the magic well. This one is real. And as long as we stick to these rules we can make a magic well for our granddaughter. We can give her the universe! To her, it’ll be like magic.
And, trust me, that magic is going to be far more important than any damn warp drive.
I don’t know yet why the date of origin—the crease in time where past meets future—is the day she is born. But, seeing Anna now… Holding her… It makes sense somehow that this would all revolve around her. I know you’ll understand.
With love, always,
Barbara Levitt
I look at Rut, squinting. He takes a coin and places it on the letter.
He leans in to hug me and hold me up as my legs give way and pats my back as I whimper weakly.
Baba’s life plays out in reverse in my head.
The day before I am born she finds Rut in the well—on my birthday she wishes for a golem and the next day she finds Tur, both of them having sprung from the well, in a way at the same time, but in reverse.
Six years before she finds a little red bicycle. She writes it down in her calendars so that when I turn six she can guess my first wish. Two years back, when I turn eight, it’s the same thing with a chocolate bar that never runs out of squares. I realize why later, even when she’d forget to buy flour or eggs or sugar, she never had trouble finding chocolate chips for her cookies.
I see Erwin living two lives on either side of the timeline.
There is one day when she does not check the well for wishes. It’s the day Abe dies, and she, for the first time, truly understands what it means to have negative energy. She marks this, too, in a calendar, and on that day in the future, in lieu of a wish, I get a story about several rabbis and the moon.
I wonder what she does with a smart phone decades before it’s released.
I imagine her surprise, and her delight, when she finds two wedding dresses in the well.
And I imagine the loneliness she feels in the long stretches of time when I don’t visit and the well runs empty every day.
One day she gets a single acorn. She will not know for sure what this means until years later when she buries her husband and plants the same acorn above his grave, but still she calculates the dates and assumes, in that moment, that she knows when she will die.
Even after Baba dies, the younger Barb continues to check the well and fulfill my wishes. Pizza dough and ice cream and earrings that contain galaxies. One day, before all that, she finds a letter that explains it all.
Before that she and Abe are drawn to a well in a part of Oregon with strange gravity and they buy a plot of land nearby and build a house and settle down and start a family.
The well taught her the secrets of the universe and she used those secrets to send men across space to distant stars and gifts across time to her granddaughter.
I bring the letter to the well. I look at the quarter Rut/Tur had handed me and notice it has no year on it. I fold the letter around it and drop it in.
I do not try to make any wishes after that.
Still… Sometimes I walk up there, anyway. I lean over the edge and stare down into the darkness. I try to glimpse beyond the singularity, knowing somewhere beyond the veil is a young Baba, determined, discovering this place and its secrets, a whole journey laid ahead of her. A whole life. And I miss her.