Amoebas: An Ode to my Science Teachers

Mopping. A world of hurdles and chains was his. When Felipe walked under erratically flickering, fervidly artificial lights, all he saw were closed doors. Through glass slits he glimpsed meaningless scratch on blackboards. Apathy beat against him as constant waves against a sandbar, paralyzing him with potent anesthetic.

Glossing. Thousands of adolescents escaped, enveloped in their superficial lives. Bubbles of trivial meaning seemed real to this chattering mass, but he could not help but see the transparence of these false worlds before their iridescence. Gossip-mongering, mutual abhorrence, the newest pregnancy. Violent slamming of lockers and vigorous kissing. The stench of gym shorts. None of it could tear him from the grip of routine.

Sweeping.

“Hey, what’s your name?” A spectacled, wildly grinning boy said.

Felipe stared at the anomaly. No one talks to janitors.

“You have one?” The boy laughed raucously.

“Felipe.”

“Well, Felipe, did you know that the mantis shrimp can see thirteen billion times more colors than we can? Colors we can’t even fathom. Wavelengths that we can only see through detectors and telescopes and stuff that took us ages to figure out how to make. Our vision is like an amoebas’ compared to theirs.”

The boy left Felipe in a stupor without saying another word.

Marveling. That night, Felipe stared at the yellow-tinged ceiling for hours. What would it all look like through a mantis shrimp’s eyes? How could a kaleidoscope of color invisible to us be an unremarkable mundanity to them? His mind churned and his skull warmed. Words that had echoed in classrooms while he wiped desks pushed themselves to his consciousness. Slowly, eventually, he faded into a vivid sleep. When he awoke, he thought he saw the after-tinges of shrimp-colors in the sagging white walls.

Discovering. As he spread water and soap over smooth tiles, Felipe waited desperately for the boy to emerge from one of the doorways. He looked for him through the sea of heads. All he could think about were the invisible colors that surrounded him. Behind these closed doors, he told himself, there could be infinities of colors. But what was an amoeba?

The boy never came. Felipe cycled through all the classrooms, emptying garbage cans and dusting desks. All was almost lost. This macrocosm through which an infinity could be accessed was almost gone forever. But Felipe asked. An old biology teacher, deadened by the lethargy of his students, sat behind the synthetic light of a laptop.

“What’s an amoeba?”

The teacher’s head shot up, and the blue-tinged laptop light disappeared. In one fluid motion, he toppled his chair backward and grabbed a piece of chalk. He scribbled frantically on the board, sketching a roughly circular shape.

“An amoeba is a tiny, infinitesimally tiny, unimaginably tiny creature. It lives in a world of chemicals, one we can never understand. We can only see it through microscopes. We are made of about 37 trillion cells, but an amoeba is only one. It moves by wriggling its entire body.”

“Is there anything smaller than an amoeba?”

“But then what are atoms made of?”

“What color is an atom?”

“How big is light?”

He spent hours asking questions that an ‘educated’ student would have suppressed. The room filled with pink light, which was soon replaced with the flickering familiarity of the long white bulbs.

Transcending. The world became an infinity of worlds: the world of atoms, the world amoebas, the world of galaxies. When Felipe walked through polished hallways under artificial lights, all he saw were open doors to open dimensions, far too many to ever explore. In every piece of food he trapped with his filthy rag, Felipe saw an immense zoo of bacteria and amoeba. Through the small gaps in the skyscraper-ridden sky, he imagined stars and sometimes even saw them — their ancient light, their transmissions from millions of years ago. Knowledge washed over him and trickled into his soul like water through particles of sand. Hurdles became upward steps and chains became ropes out of pits. Endless worlds were laid bare.