The Weight of Almost Nothing

The museum was closed and the lights in the storage room buzzed like they were tired. Soren's aunt was three aisles away, wrapping fossils in bubble plastic and complaining to nobody about the shipping schedule.

"Look at this one," said Maya. She was holding a small plastic box up to the light. Inside sat a cube of something blue, about the size of a sugar lump, except the blue wasn't really in the thing. It hung around it, like the color of distance on a far mountain.

"It's empty," said Soren.

"It's not empty. There's a label." Maya turned the box. "It says aerogel. And it says do not crush."

Soren leaned in. The cube cast almost no shadow. Where it sat on the white foam, he could barely tell where it ended and the foam began. "You can see through it," he said. "Sort of. Not like glass. Like fog that decided to hold still."

"Open it."

"Aunt Priya said don't touch the exhibit stuff."

"She said don't break it. We won't break it." Maya was already lifting the lid.

Soren put out his hand and she set the cube on his palm. He waited to feel it.

"Maya."

"What."

"I can't feel it."

She poked his palm next to the cube. "It's right there."

"I know it's right there. I'm looking at it. But my hand says there's nothing on it." He moved his hand up and down, slow. The cube stayed put, blue and ghostly. "It weighs about as much as the air over my hand. Maybe less."

Maya took it back and held it to her eye like a lens. The buzzing lights smeared. "Why is it blue? There's no blue paint. It's the same blue as the sky."

"That's a weird thing to say."

"It's the same blue as the sky," she said again, slower, because she had heard herself and something had caught. "The sky isn't painted either. The sky is air. The sky is just air doing something to light."

Soren stopped moving. "Scattering. The little particles bounce the blue around more than the other colors."

"So if this is the same blue," Maya said, "then this is mostly—"

"Air," they said together.

Maya set the cube down on the table very carefully, the way you set down something that has turned out to be alive. "It's a piece of solid air."

"It can't be all air. You can hold it. Air falls through your fingers."

"Then there's a little bit of something else holding the air still. A skeleton." Maya spread her fingers in front of the lights. "Like a net. A net so thin you mostly see the holes."

Soren found a pencil in his pocket and a scrap of packing list and wrote: blue like sky. air with a skeleton. weighs almost nothing. He looked back at the cube. "If it's almost nothing, why does the box say do not crush instead of do not lose? You can't lose air. But you also can't crush air. You squish it and it just moves."

"So it must do something air can't." Maya picked up a fossil from the packing pile, a flat gray stone with a shell pressed into it. She weighed it in her hand. "How heavy do you think this is?"

"Don't."

"I'm not crushing it. I'm asking."

Soren read the side of the box again, the small print under do not crush. He read it twice. "It says here. It says it can hold up to two thousand times its own weight."

They both looked at the cube. The cube looked back, weighing almost nothing.

"Two thousand times almost nothing," Maya said.

"Is still not very much," said Soren. "Unless almost nothing is more than we think."

Maya found a clean glass slide in the exhibit tray, the kind they put under microscopes. She balanced it on a stack of two erasers so it made a tiny bridge over the table. Then she set the aerogel cube in the middle of the bridge.

"What are you doing."

"The fossil. Give me the small one. The little snail one."

Soren handed her the little spiral fossil, gray and dense, the size of a coat button. It clicked into his memory how heavy it had felt, how it had wanted to fall.

Maya lowered it onto the cube of fog.

Soren held his breath. He was sure he was about to watch a sugar lump of sky get squashed into a smear.

The fossil sat there. The cube did not move. The blue did not so much as dent.

"It's holding it," Soren whispered. "A stone. The thing weighs like a breath and it's holding up a stone."

Maya put a second fossil on. Then a third. The little tower of stone teetered on the patch of blue almost-air, and the almost-air held, calm as anything. "How," Soren said. It wasn't really a question. He wrote how with three lines under it.

"The skeleton," Maya said. "The net is mostly empty, but the threads all touch. They pass the weight along, thread to thread to thread, all the way down. Nothing in the middle does anything. The middle's just air." She watched the stones not fall. "Most of it isn't there, and the part that is there is enough."

Soren reached out and put one finger against the cube, beside the tower of fossils. He was waiting again to feel something. He felt the faintest cool nothing, less than touching water, less than touching breath.

"It's cold," he said. "No. It's not cold. My finger's warm and it's just—staying warm. The cube isn't taking it."

"That's the holes again," Maya said. "Heat has to walk across, same as the weight. But heat hates the holes. There's almost no road for it." She put her own finger on the other side. "You could hold a flame to one side and an ice cube to the other and they wouldn't find each other."

They stood there, two of them and a stack of fossils balanced on a square of sky that did not care how heavy the world was.

Down the aisle, Aunt Priya called out that it was time to go, that the truck came at seven, that please for the love of everything do not touch the exhibit.

Neither of them answered. Maya reached for the heaviest fossil on the pile, the big gray slab with the whole fern in it, and held it over the little blue cube, and let go.