Rooftop
26 May 2022
When Noah told Abraham and Adam about his discovery of a new kind of plastic, they considered him lying. “It can’t be.” Abraham commented, “it must be something already exists, like a toy. People used to make that sort of useless things.” “Abraham’s right,” said Adam. “Remember the last time you told us about the toothpaste tube? That was but an ordinary beverage package.” Refusing to reconcile to such disbelief, Noah invited both of them to witness the truth after school. Before they could play with whatever they brought, they still had one last class to finish so that their playthings wouldn’t be confiscated by their teachers.
Plastic—which meant the colourful chips for school kids—was one of the legacies of the previous century. Or leftovers. Every winter they arrived at the harbour along with the warmth of the current. While encountering low tides, children in the village would gather on the breakwater to pick up the fragments stuck in the gaps between dolosse. Then they would clean them carefully, classifying those pieces into their unique collections, which would make them feel proud of owning something old.
That was their so-called amusement. Although those plastic pieces appeared neither amusing nor rare, they happened to be the only useless thing that the harbour kids could possibly possess. The fragments glimmered as if flakes under daylight, composing the children’s knowledge of the so-called material desire.
Knowledgeable in the very material, Abraham had sufficient reason not to believe in Noah’s self-claimed discovery. He owned more pieces of antique than any kid at his age. Living right next to a dock, his enlightenment to collecting plastic began at the age of two. When he was five, he had learned how to tell the differences between plastics produced in different ages: The solid ones were the most ancient. Films were more recent, regardless of the nuances between water-penetrable and air-penetrable ones. Yet his favourite belonged to neither of the above categories, but a kind of thick solid card with stripes. They were mostly green, sometimes blue, and occasionally red. Those cards were suggested to transfer messages with electrons, instead of light, back when petrochemicals cost only a little.
But Noah’s claim still left a question mark in Abraham’s mind, disturbing him throughout the agriculture class. He didn’t pay attention to Ms. Green at all. He was somehow reminded of Noah’s latest end-of-term presentation, in which he introduced the hydrologic cycle as though he had finished reading an entire high school textbook as a fourth-grade student. Abraham and Adam understood little of the contents, but the presentation was scored the highest because of, according to Ms. Green, the unprecedented passion for looking beyond. The event was implying that the material world as Abraham perceived it might be but a self-justifying single story, and that Noah could possibly be right about the discovery of a new kind of plastic in spite of all the remaining mistakes he had ever made on all the similar subject matters.
“Are you listening, Noah?” Ms. Green’s voice grabbed Abraham’s attention back to the classroom. “Yes. I am.” He sounded so uncertain that no one would consider him telling the truth.
“Then would you tell me if corn belongs to monocots or dicots?”
“Well … dicot?”
Some students giggled. “It belongs to monocots. Corn is very essential for our times, so pay attention.”
The presentation could be but an unprecedented accident, Abraham attempted to comfort the anxious curiosity of his own. Nevertheless, he already started to imagine how Noah’s new kind of plastic could possibly appear if, by accident, he happened to be right. He knew that Noah’s home located deep in the woods, where things of long ago could be dug out from the ground at times. It always took Noah more than an hour to climb up the winding mountain path after school. He therefore refused to visit the breakwater with other kids for several times, saying it would be too dark by the time he walks up home.
The claim was fair enough for being absent from his fellows, but such absence marked him as different, and differences always trigger curiosity, envy, and jealousy in school kids’ young minds. Abraham once mocked at him harshly because of his misunderstanding of a fundamental law of physics: He thought the speed of light depended on frequency. It didn’t become a big deal between them until Noah asked if Abraham’s father could help him prove the teacher wrong. He showed Abraham a shabby booklet, in which he found the statement that eventually guided him to misinterpretation. “It’s simply wrong. I have no idea why the author says so,” he told him.
“Please, Abraham. I know your father teaches photonics in high school.”
“Which doesn’t mean he can cheat on this. You’ll get the same answer from him as well.”
Noah’s misconception seriously affected his grade in optics that semester, and in the end he failed the subject. It wasn’t a big deal, though—Only one-third of the class passed. Every student knew that the course was designated to pick out talented kids for more challenging training programmes in the future, and the failing ones were simply unqualified. But Abraham was fulfilled by Noah’s failure with a sense of ecstasy on top of the selection process’ justification on his authenticity. Things have changed, Abraham nevertheless remembered how his father commented on the selection process. By saying so he was referring to how light used to be hard to capture, and how people once ate corn. Since corn became the primary energy resource, no one had considered corn edible.
But those weren’t the times of Abraham. He and the other kids at the same age simply knew that old things could be hard to find and recognise. In fact, as though Abraham’s expertise in plastic, Noah had his own understandings on equally old materials that appeared yet rarer in a harbour village. He once showed Abraham and Adam a tiny ship made of steel. It was rusty, much shorter than a pointer. “Mom found it in an old suitcase,” he told them, knowing they must have never seen something like it.
“It’s so … delicate,” Abraham exclaimed.
“It could be more than fifty years old.” Noah said.
Five decades were too long a duration for Abraham to imagine after all. Thinking of this, the desire to know more about the antiques further disturbed Abraham, making every second slow down even though he knew they were close to the end of the class. Fortunately, his meditation didn’t have to continue so long, as the class soon ended. He immediately exchanged sights with Noah and Adam. Without speaking a word, they tidied up their backpacks, gathered by the back door of the classroom, and paced towards the rooftop through the long corridor.
The sun was lowering, but the day still young. The shadows of the pillars depicted a peculiar pattern on the concrete wall, as if an abstract painting. A piece of art. Abraham kept peeking at Noah’s backpack as they climbed up the stairs, but it looked nothing different, and Abraham therefore failed to guess what was awaiting him.
“The air is clean,” Adam noted when he opened the door to the rooftop. All of a sudden the darkness shadowing the staircase vanished under daylight.
The roof storey was a wide platform, one-third of which occupied by infrastructures that sustained the operation of the building. The school wasn’t the tallest building in the village, but it happened to locate on the top of a tiny hill. The rooftop was therefore high enough for the three children to view the harbour village as a whole. Whenever the visibility got high enough, luxurious ferries may appear at the very end of the sea horizon, depending on their course adjustable to wind directions.
Right next to the filter towers and solar panels was a huge cubic air vent. Abraham stepped onto it for an even farther sight. Down there were numerous ships forming a long and winding frontier between water and ground, as if an organism breathing in rhythm, accommodating the sailing boats. The ocean seemed turbid and dark in the harbour, but its outside was brighter. The far-away edge shone in countless colours. Amber. Turquoise. Vermillion. Abraham recognised them, knowing they were the plastic fragments that awaited his annual collection in the upcoming season.
“Show us then.” He commanded, jumping down from the air vent.
Noah obediently took out the object in his side backpack.
It turned out to be a transparent glass marble. Through the sphere, sunlight transformed into colourful haloes. The sphere was only slightly bigger than a knuckle, and yet its exquisiteness and splendour outshone the entire surrounding, as though capable of forming within itself a universe. In the centre of the sphere, an illusion of Noah laid upside down. His face was distorted, but elegant, as if trapped in a frame that preserved his best for eternity.
Noah passed it to Abraham. “This is not plastic.” Abraham said shortly after holding the glass marble, “it’s ancient and precious, but not plastic.” As he spoke, Adam was still amazed by the changes of sunlight refracted by the sphere. He looked almost convinced that Noah had achieved some sort of great discovery.
“What else could it be? I dug quite deeply to find this. Only plastic can last for so long.”
“I don’t know its name, but I’ve seen something similar before. Don’t you think it weights too much for a plastic ball?”
While Noah remained silent, Abraham took out from his backpack a half-emptied water bottle. “May I hold it?” Adam suddenly asked. He took over the sphere and returned it after only a few seconds. “Its texture doesn’t feel like plastic,” he remarked.
“It’s too smooth,” Abraham added, dropping it into the bottle. It sank to the bottom as if a stone.
“Plastic floats in most cases.”
Noah leaned forward, as if trying to argue but ended up uttering nothing. Abraham poured out the water and held the sphere in his hand again. Its colour continuously changed while refracting and reflecting sunlight from different angles. He then took out a worn plastic bag from his backpack, putting the two objects together. The plastic bag was one of his collection, but apparently the translucency of the thin film was nothing as magnificent as those marvellous rays on the tiny glass sphere.
Abraham crouched down and flicked the sphere on the floor gently. It moved crookedly on the uneven ground. Then he gave it a more powerful push; it started to roll forward.
“Hey!” Noah cried, chasing after his precious. Abraham ran after him with the plastic bag still in his hand, and Adam soon joined them. The three kids sprinted to the rolling stone and continued running even after Noah picked it up. Their laughter and cries echoed in the clear afternoon, through the shadows of time. Although they were forced to jump over and bypass all the barriers scattered on the rooftop, their way ahead seemed endlessly elongated as their steps cut through the air.
Abraham’s plastic bag was filled with air, disturbing his steps as if a parachute. He therefore let go of it. As he rushed towards his fellows, he saw with his peripheral that the bag floated gently, swayed in the air, as though it would never fall on the ground in such mild breeze. The sunlight projected its shadow on the floor, and the faint silhouette of light grey drifted through the ocean of bricks.
When the children’s every breath became too shallow and every move too tough for them to continue running, they sat down on the floor one after another. Noah lay down, panting heavily but smiling. “You didn’t recognise the plastic ball,” he claimed in a tone of triumph, “did you?”
Abraham didn’t answer. Adam looked towards him. He was sitting with his legs crossed, staring at the plastic bag. It floated past him above, so low that he could have reached it with a single grasp. But he chose not to do so. Instead he lay down as well, allowing the shadow of the bag to veil his face. The tranquil afternoon shed light into his eyes through the gleam penetrating the thin plastic film. At that moment he found the rooftop fluid and oceanic, as if he were sinking into the depth of endless water, being pulled away by gravity from the plastic remains floating on the distant surface, and still struggling in attempt to look up, to look beyond with the strength of all his life.