The Upside-Down Mountain

The party was over and the kitchen looked like a sugar bomb had gone off in it.

"Don't pour that out," Maya said.

Soren stopped with his hands on the giant punch bowl. It was the wide glass kind, the size of a small fishbowl, and it still had about four inches of pink melted slush in the bottom. "Why not?"

"Because I want to measure something." Maya was already digging in the recycling. She came up with a paper drinking straw and Soren's little cousin's plastic dinosaur, a green one, standing on its tail.

"That's Greta's favorite," Soren said.

"I'm not going to hurt it. I'm going to drown a mountain."

Soren put down the bowl. This was the kind of sentence that made him reach for his notebook, so he did, and flattened it on the counter beside the cake plate.

"Okay," he said. "Explain the mountain."

Maya held up her phone. There was a video paused on it, dark blue, a little submarine light pushing through water that had nothing in it. "This is from today. Greta's mom had it on for the kids and nobody was watching. It's the bottom of the ocean. The actual bottom. The deepest place there is."

"Challenger Deep," Soren read off the screen. "Eleven kilometers."

"Eleven thousand meters," Maya said. "Down. Straight down." She stood the dinosaur on the counter. "Now. How tall is Everest?"

Soren knew this one. "Eight thousand, eight hundred and forty-nine."

"Meters," Maya said. "So." She looked at the dinosaur. She looked at the bowl. "If the deepest part of the ocean is eleven thousand, and the tallest mountain is only eight thousand and change. Then."

"Then the mountain fits," Soren said slowly. "Inside the hole."

"With room left over." Maya's eyes were going bright the way they did. "That's the part I can't stop thinking about. There's room left over."

Soren did the subtraction on the page. "Eleven thousand minus eight thousand eight hundred and forty-nine. That's two thousand, one hundred and fifty-one meters."

"Over a mile," Maya said. "More than a mile of water still on top of the peak. The top of the highest place on Earth, and you'd still have to go down a mile to touch it."

Soren stopped writing.

"I want to feel it," Maya said. "Numbers don't feel like anything. Get the straw."

So they built it. Maya decided the bowl was the trench. She poured the leftover slush in and added water from the tap until the bowl was full nearly to the brim, deep and pink and cold. Then she took the paper straw and measured the dinosaur against it, marking the dinosaur's height with her thumbnail.

"Greta's dinosaur is Everest," she said. "To scale-ish. Watch."

She held the green dinosaur by the tip of its tail and lowered it into the bowl.

It went down. Its little arms went under. Its grinning head went under. Maya kept lowering, her fingers going into the cold pink water, and the dinosaur kept going, and the top of its head sank below the surface, and still her hand went down, and the dinosaur touched the bottom of the bowl standing up, and there was water above it. A whole stretch of water above the highest point of the mountain, pink and quiet, with the dinosaur grinning up through it from the floor of the bowl.

Nobody said anything for a second.

"It's standing on the bottom," Soren said. "And it's still underwater. The whole thing."

"That's the part," Maya said. Her hand was still in the water. "That's exactly the part."

Soren leaned over the bowl until his nose was close to the surface. From up here the dinosaur looked tiny. Tiny and far. He tried to imagine being a fish at the surface, looking down, knowing that the tallest mountain in the world was down there in the dark under your belly with a mile of nothing on top of it.

"You couldn't even see it," he said. "If that water was real ocean. Sunlight stops way up high. The peak would be in total dark. The top of Everest, in the dark, at the bottom."

"With things living down there," Maya said. "That's in the video. There's stuff alive at the bottom of the trench. Little see-through things. They've never been to the surface. They don't know there's a surface."

Soren looked at the grinning green head under the pink water.

"They'd think the peak was the sky," he said.

Maya turned and looked at him.

"Say that again."

"If you lived at the very bottom," Soren said, "and the mountain was up above you, the peak would be the highest thing in your whole world. It'd be your sky. The top of Everest would be the ceiling." He laughed, a little shaky. "The highest place on Earth would be the up for something down there."

Maya pulled her hand out of the bowl, dripping. "And we walk around up here calling Everest the top. Like it's the top of everything."

"It's not even close to the top," Soren said. "The top is way up. It's the top of the air. There's more above the mountain than below it, almost."

"And more below the trench than we've been," Maya said. "They've only sent people to the bottom a few times. Like, you could count them." She wiped her hand on her jeans. "More people have stood on the moon's, no, wait." She stopped. "How many have been to the bottom?"

Soren wrote the question down without looking at his hand.

"Fewer than have been to space," he said. "I'm pretty sure. The deepest place on our own planet, and we've barely been."

The kitchen was quiet. Out in the living room Greta was singing to herself about cake.

Maya leaned both elbows on the counter and looked straight down into the bowl, into the cold pink water, at the dinosaur standing on the bottom with the whole pretend ocean pressing down on its grinning head.

"Get Greta," she said softly. "She should see her dinosaur be a mountain."

Soren went to get her. When he came back, Greta on his hip, Maya hadn't moved. She was still bent over the bowl, watching the small green peak hold the dark of all that water above it, and a single drip ran off the rim of the glass and landed on the counter without a sound.