“Then when I look at the sound again, it’s still all huge and steel blue and majestic, but it’s also about 2 million other colors, and the other colors move. They move around and they are so busy. Even though I’m not even in marine sciences, I think that. I even think about what they are doing in marine sciences, with virus studies and the really cool paper I read about it and how viruses explain how life got started in the first place.”
“Wow,” my mom had said. “You see a lot.”
“Exactly. If I’m a microbiologist, I can look at the view and see the water and the origin of life, all at the same time. It’s like getting rewarded, by the amazing view, for understanding exactly where it came from.”
“Oh, Jenny,” my mom said, looking at the view, “I’m not worried about you.”
“I’m not worried about me, either.” I hadn’t been.
What was there to worry about? The big stuff, you can always see. The small stuff, the stuff I love, I found out you can see that, too. Entire worlds can fit on the head of a pin. On the point of a pin. Less than that. Small worlds.
This was before I knew you could lose sight of the big world, too.
Chapter One
First Inch, Early December
I grab my laptop off the side table and open up Apertr, the site that hosts “C’s” photography blog.
Our relationship is entirely online, but we didn’t meet online.
I got a Christmas card addressed to him.
Early November, a big thick card in a green envelope arrived, addressed with such elaborate silver-inked calligraphy I could only make out Ford and my address. The previous tenant, who I knew nothing about, had moved out just before I had, so I guessed the sender meant it for him.
My landlord, a very sweet Greek man, lives two doors down, so I started down the sidewalk to give it to him to forward. Impulsively, I went back inside and grabbed a Christmas card from the box I had recently purchased and scribbled a note about how the place and C’s landlord were just the same and to have a good holiday season.
I gave both cards to my landlord to forward.
A few days later, I got a postcard.
It was printed on what felt like watercolor paper, and the picture side was filled with a sharp, oversaturated photograph of a child’s matchbook car. The photograph was so close-up that the blades of grass around the toy looked Jurassic and you could see every little pit in the paint of the car.
I loved it. A small thing made large.
The written side said New Mystery Tenant—thank you for the update and for forwarding my aunt’s card. I’m not at all surprised everything’s exactly the same. Does the pocket door in the hallway still sound like a cow mooing when you open it? I lived there for six years, all through grad school. I hope your memories will be as good as mine. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.
It wasn’t signed, but there was a URL to his Apertr blog printed along the bottom. He had actually addressed the postcard to “Mystery Tenant,” and I realized I must have forgotten to sign my card.
One of my favorite things about the house was that the pocket door sounded like a cow mooing when you opened it.
Plus, he couldn’t really be a stranger, stranger. My landlord had a deal with the university college of sciences recruitment office to accept new graduate students and research faculty, like me, so this guy might even be someone I walked by every day.
He’d lived in my place for six years. My landlord said he was a good guy.
I always try not to let that sink in too deep.
I’d looked at his blog and figured out the toy-car picture was called a macro photograph and that he took lots of them.
Macro pictures are extremely close-up pictures, with very fine focus to make usually invisible details the focus of the picture. C Ford, which was his handle on the site, mainly took pictures of small, everyday things—dandelions where you could see every feather of the seed parachute, a penny on a sidewalk with every scratch and dent in sharp, coppery focus, the bubbles clinging to the inside surface of a mug in a freshly poured cup of coffee.
It was like ordinary-life microbiology.
I had scrolled through his photographs and loved every one more than the last one. A couple of them I had copied into an email to my mom because I knew she would love them, too. When I found the matchbook-car picture, I suddenly found myself creating an Apertr profile just so that I could comment.
Lincoln (I used the name of my street, his previous street as my handle): The cow door still moos, and this picture is wonderful. Happy Holidays to you, too.
He had replied, almost instantly, via the private message feature on the site.
I miss that door. The picture you like was taken in the little side yard of the house. If you look in the gap where there’s a missing brick on the side of the garage, I bet this car is still where I left it.