“There’s limestone,” he whispers. “Twelve feet down. A shelf. And above it, calcium deposits in the—”
He pauses, searching for words.
“Layers. I can feel the layers beneath me.”
A breeze comes down off the ridge, carrying sage and the faint dry musk of something animal, jackrabbit maybe, or coyote. It hits Oz’s surface and his whole form ripples, every inch of him registering the moving air.
Colors chase across him in chaotic, overlapping waves: amber, rose, deep green, a blue so dark it’s almost black, colors I’ve never seen him produce.
He extends a tendril toward the nearest creosote bush and lets the tip brush a cluster of tiny waxy leaves.
“This plant is stressed,” he says quietly. “It hasn’t had deep water in a long time. The roots are reaching laterally, not down. It’s doing something remarkable with very little.”
I sit down on the concrete step and watch him move through my backyard like a visitor to a cathedral.
He touches everything.
The wooden fence post, warped and silvered with age. The coil of gardenhose I left out two summers ago. A patch of grass growing in the crack where the concrete meets the dirt.
Each contact produces a new ripple of color, a new pause, a new soft observation.
He finds a scorpion under a flat rock and crouches over it, his glow dimming to near-nothing so he won’t disturb it.
“She’s carrying,” he murmurs. “I can feel the weight distribution. Seventeen. Maybe eighteen.”
“You can count baby scorpions?”
“Their combined mass creates a very slight density differential through the ground.”
The scorpion, unbothered by the enormous glowing entity hovering three inches above her, trundles off into the darkness.
Oz watches her go with the same focused attention he gave the pizza, the river stones, my body.
He straightens and tilts his face to the sky again.
The gold constellations on his surface have synchronized, pulsing in a slow rhythm that mirrors something, and it takes me a minute to realize he’s matching the visible flicker of the stars, the atmospheric scintillation that makes them seem to breathe.
“I can feel them,” he says. “The radiant energy. I could always feel it through the fissure, but I thought—”
His voice catches, a wet, resonant sound, like a finger dragged along the rim of a glass.
“I thought that was all there was. The warmth from one direction. I made a map. Decades of information, the seasonal shifts, I cataloged every variation.”
He is quiet for a long beat.
“There are so many of them.”
I press my palms flat against the concrete and breathe.
Decades.
He lay in a cave for decades feeling starlight through a crack and thought that thin band of radiant heat was the whole sky.
Hemapped it.
He cataloged seasonal shifts in the warmth pattern and built a model of the universe from fourteen inches of information, and the model was so small, and the real thing is so big, and he is standing in my backyard finding it for the first time in his life.
The sky is enormous above us, and the stars are doing what they always do, and the monster in my backyard is tasting the desert and falling in love with every molecule of it.
